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Concept

Flying and gliding animals

Related publications (25)

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

Fluid-structure interactions of bristled wings: the trade-off between weight and drag

Pedro Miguel Nunes Pereira de Almeida Reis, Matteo Pezzulla, Yuexia Luna Lin

The smallest flying insects often have bristled wings resembling feathers or combs. We combined experiments and three-dimensional numerical simulations to investigate the trade-off between wing weight and drag generation. In experiments of bristled strips, ...

Royal Soc2023

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

Beyond undulation! Body morphology and sensing components of elongated animals and robots reveal skills to maintain competent locomotion

Laura Isabel Paez Coy

Locomotion is an essential evolutive innovation of living beings that allows them to colonize and dominate the planet. As diverse as animal morphologies are (living) and were (extinct), their locomotion modalities are also diverse. In particular, animal mo ...

EPFL2023

The nuclear-to-cytoplasmic ratio drives cellularization in the close animal relative Sphaeroforma arctica

Omaya Pierre Dudin, Marine Olivetta

The ratio of nuclear content to cytoplasmic volume (N/C ratio) is a key regulator driving the maternal-to -zy-gotic transition in most animal embryos. Altering this ratio often impacts zygotic genome activation and de-regulates the timing and outcome of em ...

CELL PRESS2023

Not gone with the wind: Active microscale flight with highly porous bristled wings

Pedro Miguel Nunes Pereira de Almeida Reis, Yuexia Luna Lin

The finesse of sub-millimeter insect flight with comb-like bristled wings raises intriguing questions, not only on fluid-structure interactions (FSI) but also on the mechanical behavior of the underlying, highly porous structures. Farisenkov et al. charact ...

ELSEVIER2022

Flexural-tensegrity snapping tails for bio-inspired propulsion in fluids

Pedro Miguel Nunes Pereira de Almeida Reis

Many aquatic animals propel themselves by flapping their tails. Leveraging a recently proposed snapping cantilever beam based on the concept of flexural tensegrity, we propose a bio-inspired propulsion device. The design comprises a segmental beam with hol ...

ELSEVIER2022

Aeroelastic characterisation of a bio-inspired flapping membrane wing

Karen Ann J Mulleners, Alexander Gehrke

Natural fliers like bats exploit the complex fluid-structure interaction between their flexible membrane wings and the air with great ease. Yet, replicating and scaling the balance between the structural and fluid-dynamical parameters of unsteady membrane ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2022

Phenomenology and scaling of optimal flapping wing kinematics

Karen Ann J Mulleners, Alexander Gehrke

Biological flapping wing fliers operate efficiently and robustly in a wide range of flight conditions and are a great source of inspiration to engineers. The unsteady aerodynamics of flapping wing flight are dominated by large-scale vortical structures tha ...

IOP PUBLISHING LTD2021

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

Corticolumbar dynamics during recovery after spinal cord injury

Selin Anil

In humans, a severe spinal cord contusion interrupts the vast majority of supraspinal projections to the spinal cord below the lesion. Permanent paralysis results from the chronic failure of these spared projections to engage lumbar circuits producing leg ...

EPFL2020

Pre-impact detection algorithm to identify lack of balance due to tripping-like perturbations

Silvestro Micera

This study investigates the performance of an updated version of our pre-impact detection algorithm while parsing out hip kinematics in order to identify unexpected tripping-like perturbations during walking. This approach grounds on the hypothesis that du ...

IEEE2019

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

Flow dynamics of a dandelion pappus: A linear stability approach

François Gallaire, Pier Giuseppe Ledda, Francesco Viola, Lorenzo Siconolfi

The study and control of flow instabilities is a key problem in aerodynamics. Aircrafts are designed not only to generate the lift force needed to balance their weight but, more importantly, to be stable and reasonably steady when in cruise conditions. Sim ...

2019

Effects of repeated waist-pull perturbations on gait stability in subjects with cerebellar ataxia

Silvestro Micera

Background: Damage to the cerebellum can affect neural structures involved in locomotion, causing gait and balance disorders. However, the integrity of cerebellum does not seem to be critical in managing sudden and unexpected environmental changes such as ...

BioMed Central2019

Cortical reactive balance responses to unexpected slippages while walking: a pilot study

Silvestro Micera

Understanding how the human brain cortex behaves when the dynamical balance is unexpectedly challenged can be useful to enable fall prevention strategies during daily activities. In this respect, we designed and tested a novel methodological approach to ea ...

IEEE2019

Locomotion Dynamics for Bio-inspired Robots with Soft Appendages: Application to Flapping Flight and Passive Swimming

Yannick Morel

In animal locomotion, either in fish or flying insects, the use of flexible terminal organs or appendages greatly improves the performance of locomotion (thrust and lift). In this article, we propose a general unified framework for modeling and simulating ...

Springer2017

The ultimate and proximate mechanisms driving the evolution of long tails in forest deer mice

Susanne Petra Pfeifer

Understanding both the role of selection in driving phenotypic change and its underlying genetic basis remain major challenges in evolutionary biology. Here, we use modern tools to revisit a classic system of local adaptation in the North American deer mou ...

Wiley2017

Aerial Locomotion in Cluttered Environments

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Mirko Kovac, Adam Klaptocz, Jürg Markus Germann

Many environments where robots are expected to operate are cluttered with objects, walls, debris, and different horizontal and vertical structures. In this chapter, we present four design features that allow small robots to rapidly and safely move in 3 dim ...

Springer-Verlag Berlin2016

Chronic multichannel neural recordings from soft regenerative microchannel electrodes during gait

Silvestro Micera, Stéphanie Lacour, Marco Capogrosso, Sophie Marie Marthe Wurth, Katherine Marie Musick, Jacopo Rigosa

Reliably interfacing a nerve with an electrode array is one of the approaches to restore motor and sensory functions after an injury to the peripheral nerve. Accomplishing this with current technologies is challenging as the electrode-neuron interface ofte ...

Nature Publishing Group2015