Publications associées à Mécanique du vol

Accurate and agile flight with winged drones

Drones hold promise to assist in civilian tasks. To realize this application, future drones must operate within large cities, covering large distances while navigating within cluttered urban landscapes. The increased efficiency of winged drones over rotary ...

EPFL2024

The effects of kinematics, flexibility, and planform on the vortex formation and aerodynamic performance of flapping wing flight

Alexander Gehrke

In this thesis, the aerodynamic challenges in flapping wing flight are addressed. In particular, the effects of different wing kinematics, flexibilities, and planforms on the the leading edge vortex development and aerodynamic performance are investigated. ...

EPFL2023

How ornithopters can perch autonomously on a branch

Raphael Zufferey

Flapping wings produce lift and thrust in bio-inspired aerial robots, leading to quiet, safe and efficient flight. However, to extend their application scope, these robots must perch and land, a feat widely demonstrated by birds. Despite recent progress, f ...

Nature Portfolio2022

Observing the Central Arctic Atmosphere and Surface with University of Colorado uncrewed aircraft systems

Julia Schmale, Radiance Flore Aurore Calmer

Over a five-month time window between March and July 2020, scientists deployed two small uncrewed aircraft systems (sUAS) to the central Arctic Ocean as part of legs three and four of the MOSAiC expedition. These sUAS were flown to measure the thermodynami ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2022

The dynamics and timescales of static stall

Karen Ann J Mulleners, Sébastien Le Fouest, Julien Dominique Claude Deparday

Airfoil stall plays a central role in the design of safe and efficient lifting surfaces. We typically distinguish between static and dynamic stall based on the unsteady rate of change of an airfoil’s angle of attack. Despite the somewhat misleading denotat ...

2021

Autonomous flight at low altitude using light sensors and little computational power

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Antoine Beyeler

The ability to fly at low altitude while actively avoiding collisions with the terrain and objects such as trees and buildings is a great challenge for small unmanned aircraft. This paper builds on top of a control strategy called optiPilot whereby a serie ...

2010

Autonomous flight at low altitude with vision-based collision avoidance and GPS-based path following

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Antoine Beyeler

The ability to fly at low altitude while actively avoiding collisions with the terrain and other objects is a great challenge for small unmanned aircraft. This paper builds on top of a control strategy called optiPilot whereby a series of optic-flow detect ...

IEEE2010

Vision-based control of near-obstacle flight

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Antoine Beyeler

This paper presents a novel control strategy, which we call optiPilot, for autonomous flight in the vicinity of obstacles. Most existing autopilots rely on a complete 6-degree-of-freedom state estimation using a GPS and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) a ...

2009

Bio-inspired vision-based flying robots

Jean-Christophe Zufferey

There are not yet autonomous flying robots capable of manoeuvring in small cluttered environments as insects do. Encouraged by this observation, this thesis presents the development of ultra-light flying robots and control systems going one step toward ful ...

EPFL2005