Publications by Enrico Ajanic | EPFL Graph Search

Agile perching maneuvers in birds and morphing-wing drones

Dario Floreano, Valentin Wüest, Simon Jeger, Enrico Ajanic

Avian perching maneuvers are one of the most frequent and agile flight sce narios, where highly optimized flight trajectories, produced by rapid wing and tail morphing that generate high angular rates and accelerations, reduce kinetic energy at impact. Whi ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2024

Wing and tail morphing in birds and drones

Enrico Ajanic

To aid humans in civilian tasks, future drones will have to operate in large cities that abound with difficult flight conditions such as confined spaces, obstacles, and turbulent air. Such drones must cruise efficiently to cover vast distances fast and als ...

EPFL2023

How to Swoop and Grasp Like a Bird With a Passive Claw for a High-Speed Grasping

Dario Floreano, William John Stewart, Enrico Ajanic, Matthias Müller

There is a growing interest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) grasping, perching, and interacting with their surroundings by means of claws, arms, hooks, and other appendages. While multirotor vehicles can slowly lower onto a target object and grasp it, w ...

2022

Sharp turning maneuvers with avian-inspired wing and tail morphing

Dario Floreano, Valentin Wüest, Enrico Ajanic, Mir Alikhan Bin Mohammad Feroskhan

Flight in dense environments, such as forests and cities requires drones to perform sharp turns. Although fixed-wing drones are aerodynamically and energetically more efficient than multicopters, they require a comparatively larger area to turn and thus ar ...

2022

Robotic Avian Wing Explains Aerodynamic Advantages of Wing Folding and Stroke Tilting in Flapping Flight

Dario Floreano, Enrico Ajanic

Avian flapping strategies have the potential to revolutionize future drones as they may considerably improve agility, increase slow speed flight capability, and extend the aerodynamic performance. The study of live birds is time-consuming, laborious, and, ...

2022

Accurate Vision-based Flight with Fixed-Wing Drones

Dario Floreano, Valentin Wüest, Enrico Ajanic

Fixed-wing drones must navigate to the desired location accurately for maneuvers such as picking up objects and perching. However, current GNSS receivers limit their navigation accuracy to several meters in outdoor environments, making such maneuvers impos ...

2022

Variable-stiffness tensegrity spine

Dario Floreano, Davide Zappetti, Enrico Ajanic, Roc Arandes Vilagrasa

Vertebrates, including amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, with their ability to change the stiffness of the spine to increase load-bearing capability or flexibility, have inspired roboticists to develop artificial variable-stiffness spines. However, ...

2020

Bioinspired wing and tail morphing extends drone flight capabilities

Dario Floreano, Stefano Mintchev, Enrico Ajanic, Flavio Noca, Mir Alikhan Bin Mohammad Feroskhan

The aerodynamic designs of winged drones are optimized for specific flight regimes. Large lifting surfaces provide maneuverability and agility but result in larger power consumption, and thus lower range, when flying fast compared with small lifting surfac ...

2020