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Flying Into the Wind: Insects and Bio-Inspired Micro-Air-Vehicles With a Wing-Stroke Dihedral Steer Passively Into Wind-Gusts

Natural fliers utilize passive and active flight control strategies to cope with windy conditions. This capability makes them incredibly agile and resistant to wind gusts. Here, we study how insects achieve this, by combining Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analyses of flying fruit flies with fre...

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Autores principales: Olejnik, Diana A., Muijres, Florian T., Karásek, Matěj, Honfi Camilo, Leonardo, De Wagter, Christophe, de Croon, Guido C.H.E.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8907628/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35280961
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2022.820363
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author Olejnik, Diana A.
Muijres, Florian T.
Karásek, Matěj
Honfi Camilo, Leonardo
De Wagter, Christophe
de Croon, Guido C.H.E.
author_facet Olejnik, Diana A.
Muijres, Florian T.
Karásek, Matěj
Honfi Camilo, Leonardo
De Wagter, Christophe
de Croon, Guido C.H.E.
author_sort Olejnik, Diana A.
collection PubMed
description Natural fliers utilize passive and active flight control strategies to cope with windy conditions. This capability makes them incredibly agile and resistant to wind gusts. Here, we study how insects achieve this, by combining Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analyses of flying fruit flies with freely-flying robotic experiments. The CFD analysis shows that flying flies are partly passively stable in side-wind conditions due to their dorsal-ventral wing-beat asymmetry defined as wing-stroke dihedral. Our robotic experiments confirm that this mechanism also stabilizes free-moving flapping robots with similar asymmetric dihedral wing-beats. This shows that both animals and robots with asymmetric wing-beats are dynamically stable in sideways wind gusts. Based on these results, we developed an improved model for the aerodynamic yaw and roll torques caused by the coupling between lateral motion and the stroke dihedral. The yaw coupling passively steers an asymmetric flapping flyer into the direction of a sideways wind gust; in contrast, roll torques are only stabilizing at high air gust velocities, due to non-linear coupling effects. The combined CFD simulations, robot experiments, and stability modeling help explain why the majority of flying insects exhibit wing-beats with positive stroke dihedral and can be used to develop more stable and robust flapping-wing Micro-Air-Vehicles.
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spelling pubmed-89076282022-03-11 Flying Into the Wind: Insects and Bio-Inspired Micro-Air-Vehicles With a Wing-Stroke Dihedral Steer Passively Into Wind-Gusts Olejnik, Diana A. Muijres, Florian T. Karásek, Matěj Honfi Camilo, Leonardo De Wagter, Christophe de Croon, Guido C.H.E. Front Robot AI Robotics and AI Natural fliers utilize passive and active flight control strategies to cope with windy conditions. This capability makes them incredibly agile and resistant to wind gusts. Here, we study how insects achieve this, by combining Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analyses of flying fruit flies with freely-flying robotic experiments. The CFD analysis shows that flying flies are partly passively stable in side-wind conditions due to their dorsal-ventral wing-beat asymmetry defined as wing-stroke dihedral. Our robotic experiments confirm that this mechanism also stabilizes free-moving flapping robots with similar asymmetric dihedral wing-beats. This shows that both animals and robots with asymmetric wing-beats are dynamically stable in sideways wind gusts. Based on these results, we developed an improved model for the aerodynamic yaw and roll torques caused by the coupling between lateral motion and the stroke dihedral. The yaw coupling passively steers an asymmetric flapping flyer into the direction of a sideways wind gust; in contrast, roll torques are only stabilizing at high air gust velocities, due to non-linear coupling effects. The combined CFD simulations, robot experiments, and stability modeling help explain why the majority of flying insects exhibit wing-beats with positive stroke dihedral and can be used to develop more stable and robust flapping-wing Micro-Air-Vehicles. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-02-24 /pmc/articles/PMC8907628/ /pubmed/35280961 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2022.820363 Text en Copyright © 2022 Olejnik, Muijres, Karásek, Honfi Camilo, De Wagter and de Croon. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Robotics and AI
Olejnik, Diana A.
Muijres, Florian T.
Karásek, Matěj
Honfi Camilo, Leonardo
De Wagter, Christophe
de Croon, Guido C.H.E.
Flying Into the Wind: Insects and Bio-Inspired Micro-Air-Vehicles With a Wing-Stroke Dihedral Steer Passively Into Wind-Gusts
title Flying Into the Wind: Insects and Bio-Inspired Micro-Air-Vehicles With a Wing-Stroke Dihedral Steer Passively Into Wind-Gusts
title_full Flying Into the Wind: Insects and Bio-Inspired Micro-Air-Vehicles With a Wing-Stroke Dihedral Steer Passively Into Wind-Gusts
title_fullStr Flying Into the Wind: Insects and Bio-Inspired Micro-Air-Vehicles With a Wing-Stroke Dihedral Steer Passively Into Wind-Gusts
title_full_unstemmed Flying Into the Wind: Insects and Bio-Inspired Micro-Air-Vehicles With a Wing-Stroke Dihedral Steer Passively Into Wind-Gusts
title_short Flying Into the Wind: Insects and Bio-Inspired Micro-Air-Vehicles With a Wing-Stroke Dihedral Steer Passively Into Wind-Gusts
title_sort flying into the wind: insects and bio-inspired micro-air-vehicles with a wing-stroke dihedral steer passively into wind-gusts
topic Robotics and AI
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8907628/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35280961
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2022.820363
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