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Concept

Flight

Related publications (30)

Bioinspired wing and tail morphing extends drone flight capabilities

Dario Floreano, Stefano Mintchev, Enrico Ajanic, Flavio Noca

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

A Morphing Cargo Drone for Safe Flight in Proximity of Humans

Dario Floreano, Przemyslaw Mariusz Kornatowski, William John Stewart

Delivery drones used by logistics companies today are equipped with unshielded propellers, which represent a major hurdle for in-hand parcel delivery. The exposed propeller blades are hazardous to unsuspecting bystanders, pets, and untrained users. One sol ...

2020

A bioinspired Separated Flow wing provides turbulence resilience and aerodynamic efficiency for miniature drones

Stefano Mintchev

Small-scale drones have enough sensing and computing power to find use across a growing number of applications. However, flying in the low-Reynolds number regime remains challenging. High sensitivity to atmospheric turbulence compromises vehicle stability ...

AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE2020

The Foldable Drone: A Morphing Quadrotor That Can Squeeze and Fly

Dario Floreano, Stefano Mintchev, Davide Scaramuzza

The recent advances in state estimation, perception, and navigation algorithms have significantly contributed to the ubiquitous use of quadrotors for inspection, mapping, and aerial imaging. To further increase the versatility of quadrotors, recent works i ...

2019

The role of optic flow pooling in insect flight control in cluttered environments

Dario Floreano, Julien Jean Denis Nicolas Lecoeur

Flight through cluttered environments, such as forests, poses great challenges for animals and machines alike because even small changes in flight path may lead to collisions with nearby obstacles. When flying along narrow corridors, insects use the magnit ...

Nature Research2019

Insect-Inspired Visual Perception for Flight Control and Collision Avoidance

Julien Jean Denis Nicolas Lecoeur

Flying robots are increasingly used for tasks such as aerial mapping, fast exploration, video footage and monitoring of buildings. Autonomous flight at low altitude in cluttered and unknown environments is an active research topic because it poses challen ...

EPFL2019

Spatial Encoding of Translational Optic Flow in Planar Scenes by Elementary Motion Detector Arrays

Dario Floreano, Julien Jean Denis Nicolas Lecoeur

Elementary Motion Detectors (EMD) are well-established models of visual motion estimation in insects. The response of EMDs are tuned to specific temporal and spatial frequencies of the input stimuli, which matches the behavioural response of insects to wid ...

Nature Research2018

Bioinspired dual-stiffness origami

Dario Floreano, Stefano Mintchev, Jun Shintake

Origami manufacturing has led to considerable advances in the field of foldable structures with innovative applications in robotics, aerospace, and metamaterials. However, existing origami are either load-bearing structures that are prone to tear and fail ...

2018

A multi-modal hovering and terrestrial robot with adaptive morphology

Dario Floreano, Stefano Mintchev

Most current drones are designed with a static morphology aimed at exploiting a single locomotion mode. This results in limited versatility and adaptability to multi-domain environments, such as those encountered in rescue missions, agriculture and inspect ...

2018

Bioinspired morphing wings for extended flight envelope and roll control of small drones

Dario Floreano, Stefano Mintchev, Grégoire Hilaire Marie Heitz, Flavio Noca

Small-winged drones can face highly varied aerodynamic requirements, such as high manoeuvrability for flight among obstacles and high wind resistance for constant ground speed against strong headwinds that cannot all be optimally addressed by a single aero ...

Royal Society, The2017