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Concept

Aile (anatomie des insectes)

Publications associées (27)

Accurate and agile flight with winged drones

Valentin Wüest

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

Earwig-inspired foldable origami wing for micro air vehicle gliding

Jamie Paik

Foldable wings serve as an effective solution for reducing the size of micro air vehicles (MAVs) during non-flight phases, without compromising the gliding capacity provided by the wing area. Among insects, earwigs exhibit the highest folding ratio in thei ...

Frontiers Media Sa2023

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

Wind Defiant Morphing Drones

Dario Floreano, William John Stewart, Charalampos Vourtsis, Victor Casas Rochel, Nathan Samuel Müller

Intense winds are a challenge for vertical take-off and landing drones with wings. In particular, in the hovering regime, wings are sensitive to wind currents that can be detrimental to their operational and energetic performances. Tail-sitters are particu ...

2023

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

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

To tread or not to tread: comparison between water treading and conventional flapping wing kinematics

Karen Ann J Mulleners, Alexander Gehrke, Swathi Badala Krishna

Hovering insects are limited by their physiology and need to rotate their wings at the end of each back-and-forth motion to keep the wing's leading edge ahead of its trailing edge. The wing rotation at the end of each half-stroke pushes the leading edge vo ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2022

Flexible surgical device with controllable stiffness

Charles Baur, Lennart Rubbert

The invention relates to a surgical device (10), comprising a tubular outer shaft (12,) and an inner element (14) having an elongated shape, the outer shaft comprising a distal (30a) and a proximal (30b) outer hinges, the inner element comprising an inner ...

2022

Sharp turning maneuvers with avian-inspired wing and tail morphing

Dario Floreano, Valentin Wüest, Enrico Ajanic

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

Lagrangian analysis of bio-inspired vortex ring formation

Karen Ann J Mulleners, Mrudhula Baskaran

Pulsatile jet propulsion is a highly energy-efficient swimming mode used by various species of aquatic animals that continues to inspire engineers of underwater vehicles. Here, we present a bio-inspired jet propulsor that combines the flexible hull of a je ...

2022

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

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

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

Role of Nimrod receptors in the Drosophila melanogaster cellular immune response

Claudia Melcarne

The use of modern molecular biology tools and simple but powerful tractable model organisms such as Drosophila has contributed significantly to our recent advances in the innate immunity field, notably phagocytosis. Since 2001, many phagocytic transmembran ...

EPFL2020

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

Two Nimrod receptors, NimC1 and Eater, synergistically contribute to bacterial phagocytosis in Drosophila melanogaster

Bruno Lemaitre, Jan Paul Dudzic, Elodie Julie Virginie Ramond, Claudia Melcarne

Eater and NimC1 are transmembrane receptors of the Drosophila Nimrod family, specifically expressed in haemocytes, the insect blood cells. Previous ex vivo and in vivoRNAi studies have pointed to their role in the phagocytosis of bacteria. Here, we have cr ...

2019

Sex-dependent and sex-independent regulatory systems of size variation in natural populations

Bart Deplancke, Vincent Roland Julien Gardeux, Ernst Hafen

Size of organs/organisms is a polygenic trait. Many of the growth-regulatory genes constitute conserved growth signaling pathways. However, how these multiple genes are orchestrated at the systems level to attain the natural variation in size including sex ...

2019