Adaptive morphing for stable, resilient, and energy-efficient flight of avian-informed drones
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ก.พ. 2025
- Avian-informed drones feature morphing wing and tail surfaces, enhancing agility and adaptability in flight. Despite their large potential, realising their full capabilities remains challenging due to the lack of generalized control strategies accommodating their large degrees of freedom and cross-coupling effects between their control surfaces. Here we propose a new body-rate controller for avian-informed drones that uses all available actuators to control the motion of the drone. The method exhibits robustness against physical perturbations, turbulent airflow, and even loss of certain actuators mid-flight. Furthermore, wing and tail morphing is leveraged to enhance energy efficiency at 8m/s, 10m/s and 12m/s using in-flight Bayesian optimization. The resulting morphing configurations yield significant gains across all three speeds of up to 11.5% compared to non-morphing configurations and display a strong resemblance to avian flight at different speeds. This research lays the groundwork for the development of autonomous avian-informed drones that operate under diverse wind conditions, emphasizing the role of morphing in improving energy efficiency.
Publication, Supplementary Material:
www.nature.com...
PDF:
rdcu.be/d0RuN
Data and Code:
doi.org/10.528...
Authors:
Simon Jeger, Valentin Wüest, Charbel Toumieh, Dario Floreano
Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS) at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
Video references:
Kestrel hovering • Kestrel Hovering and H... - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Finally can build and ride those giant eagles from Lord of the Rings
I really hope I get to see this happen in my lifetime!
Hi!
I'm 4 going on 5 moons old.
Please, give me just a moment with this video's morffing avian and its history.
🐾 _Montréal 🇨🇦_
Ornithopters from Dune
And we finally Will answer the question. Could the felowship of the ring Just ride the Eagles and fly to Mordor ?
Get outta my head
Leonardo Da Vinci would be proud and absolutely amazed!
This is brilliant. A small insight which might help you is that the horizontal stabilizer of a bird is not always horizontal. It can turn up and down by an angle of maybe 45-55 degrees on both sides. It may be difficult to execute and hence you may have omitted it
This is awesome.
As a glider pilot I’ve always been in awe of birds.
Same here. Pure flight. Motor a distraction. 😀
Fascinating marriage of many technologies, materials, and capabilities into a novel craft. Leonardo would be proud! Please do not put bomb on it.
For drones with a more "spicy" payload, conventional style wings are a much better choice. Cheap, simple and more effective for higher speeds. Birds are lightweight, and agile for catching bugs or other birds. Drones serve a much different purpose, typically for taking out infantry and slow moving vehicles
lol why do you think they’re making it?
I had thought about stuff like this for so long and finally someone went and dit it. Great great work
What I love is how quiet (=efficient) a hummingbird is, compared with a nasty little drone just butchering the air with four 20,000 rpm props.
They aren't quite. They make a loud buzzing sound when they fly. It's a lot of noise for something so tiny. Super amazing that life can power such a complicated wing pattern at such speeds for so long. Sugar is powerful fuel. I'm curious about how the hummingbird compares to a drone pound for pound in making sound. Drones are noisy all the time but they are noiser when moving than hovering.
Pretty amazing. Glad I didn't skip on this video.
I designed a 9m2 Kite and analysed the different states of flight equilibrium. You are in the right direction! Congratulations, i hope the best for your future developments!
Birds get thrust from a propeller?!? Who knew?! 😂
Looks great! When it’s controlling itself in the air it looks almost alive.
Bro that is actually amazing. We wait a full devlog
woah, Its really good, this is a major step forward as people have said. As mentioned thats 8 channels, thats difficult to fly, It would make sense that the 4 sweep channels would be controlled by a gyro while the other 4 channels (rudder, left/right aileron, rudder, elevator) be controlled by a human. The additon of sweeps may lower durability of the aircraft during landings and crashes while the
Wow! I’m amazed the way is able to adjust itself so quickly to maintain it’s stationary (airborne) position.
thank you for your research, this is amazing for intelligence drones
This looks awesome!! Good job
This is extremely nice. Good work.
Very cool, i barely understand how it works but its AMAZING
A major step forward.
Brilliant project, congratulations.
0:04 It's neat to see the effects of low pressure across the wing iops. You can the the feather tips lift up periodically.
I was just thinking about this a few days ago. The You Tube algorithm really does guess well sometimes.
The algorithm was even faster with me because I hadn't had the time to think of it before the video showed up.
With like 300 to 500 likes they knows you better than most friends. So imagine how well the algorithm knows you at this point. Also the different apps share info about you all the time.
great work
Awesome work! I think you will able to make the brain for that with my software, that wold be fascinating
Good job,excellent
coolest thing i have seen all year
This absolutely awesome. Amazing work!
We have almost the same concept,In reality the outermost of the wing create. remarkable lift that improves efficiency.
0:07 i realize the design still need rudder while real bird dont
To skip rudder they need to add wingtips bend
@@nassirnassir7286propellers create additional yaw. Not sure if they can get rid of that vertical stabilizer unless someone knows how to eliminate/counteract the prop’s horizontal force.
@@yiflux5124 PTERANODON Rudder control with crest.. write it on youtube , he solved this issue
@@yiflux5124 just add another one going the other way
@@yiflux5124 if there were two roters side by side do you think they could get away with not having a rudder?
Great and well-executed idea.
Wow that's amazing.
Would love to see a flock of these used to turn an airborne wind energy system
Thank's for sharing.
Excellent work!
nice work!
Unbelievably cool!
This is cool stuff, I always wonder how it would compare to a typical rc drone.
Would be sick to an upsize version capable of staying afloat with only gliding.
Awesome ❤
Maravilloso 😊
İncredible work
Awesome for autonomous flight ...more efficiency...
Wow incredible
May I share this on my channel? I will leave the link to the video in the description and pinned comment… I’m a novice RC plane builder so this is very interesting and absolutely brilliant…
this is incredible
this is dope!
🔥❤️🔥
What materials have you tried using for your surface features so far?
Довольно эффективно для малой авиации и только для дозвуковых скоростей. Представляю, как будут кувыркаться пассажиры в салоне, когда для преодоления турбулентности пилотам придётся выполнять фигуры высшего пилотажа😂
good job ！~
❤❤❤
damn... a whole lot is gonna change in drone warfare and recon!
very cool! I wonder how power efficient this compute could be in an untethered environment.
I can get up to 15 - 20 minutes flight time with my homemade biplane using a 3S 2200mah 30c Spektrum gen 2 battery so this should be able to do even better. Looks like it has very little drag compared to my biplane and looks like it could glide for a long time especially in the summer with thermal updrafts and a slight breeze…
Awesome!
that is so freaking cool
bro this is soooo cool , no shit
looks sick
omg love it
Damn. Can’t wait to say I knew about these guys before the got their big defense contracts
amazing
Наконец-то первоиспытатели могут спать спокойно, они не ошиблись - оно действительно летает.
Любой чемпионский планер летает лучше птиц.
This is so cool, but I want to see it fly and maintain stability in a more chaotic environment
parabens!
Future is horizon
Incredible, what type of actuators were used?
Judging by the noise, just regular RC servos. Not much power needed for these motions.
Just like all of those real birds with a stationary wings, vertical tail stabiliser and a spinning nose-propeller as thrust.
... this looks like a plane with extra steps.
amazing!
Cool
Scale it up for those awesome Atreides Orthinopters
Not sure if someone has done the math on this, but my intuition tells me dragonfly-style flight is not only easier in lower Reynold's Number regimes from an aerodynamic standpoint but also on a smaller scale (unrelated to Reynold's Number) from a structural standpoint due to the square-cube law.
Is it compatible with a spektrum NX10?
Increase efficiency? Or fixing the intrinsic inefficiency?
yes
birds aren't real
And this video is proof that even commoners can build fake birds not as good as the government ones though
Won't be
so is this statement then
I think this video does a good job of showing what birds really look like under all those feathers
They aren't not, though
This would be so much cooler if it were actually slope soaring, rather than having a motor. Like the first clip.
👍. Интересно только как птицы остаются неподвижными без пропеллера🤔?
Wow this is really cool!!
This would actually be great for planes if it can be simplified
So at the end pigeons are government stated drones.
all ways were
Should have a more flexible wing span since birds use high flexibility wing span and not tail motion.
Problem is that birds control flight without a vertical tail. They utelise a high twist though the wingspan (around 12°) to achieve a vortex shedding at the 2/3 point out from the centenline. This creates proverse yaw when entering cornes. Not as traditional flightsurfaces, that produce adverse yaw thus youd need the vertical tail to counteract. The whole control sceme of your dron is wrong and based on a human aproach not a reality based one.
I admire what theyre doing, but I do wish theyed ditch the vertical stabs. Nature has proven they dont need them and if they ditch them and accomplish stable flight then theyll be really accomplishing something.
@@iamscoutstfuNature doesn’t use props. The propeller produces several turning tendencies that mostly leave a left yawing motion that the drone needs to correct. For this reason, I’d bet that they need some extra control over the vertical axis unless they want to make a contra rotating or a dual motor setup
Vertical tails are for the birds is what you're saying right? Such irony.
@@po1ly414 they could use a contra rotating propellor, or jusst 2 propellors. However I think this will make it less efficient, or too complicated
nah man, these people have a great approach to improving ornithopters. by focusing on one aspect of biomimicry they can get a working model up and running and start gathering data and making improvements quickly. A propeller and vertical tail is proven tech with well defined behavior allowing them to develop their novel independent feather control system without having to develop a wing flapping propulsion scheme at the same time. also this drone does seem to be flying in reality, and i cant seem to find yours anywhere
Unlike the birds, it uses vertical stabilisers in its tail.
Birds fly slow relative to man made machines, so this would only be applicable for slow flight like surveillance and military drones for getting close up without being detected
payload ratio?
OMG OMG >>> AIRPLANEEEEESS 🙃
To think that Da Vinci came up with that centuries ago.
this is a really good idea, but in my opinion, this drone is more complicated and harder to fly than regular drones. So why not just use a simple, easy to fly and build drone?
Realisitically, for any actual flying they would add some control software that makes it similar controls to normal, just probably needs some practice
Where can I download this?
1:04 mmmmh yes „stable“😂
They cut the video just before it spins out lol
@@ericmercer9208 If it cut, how can you know?
Now that documentary about the crazy guy saying "birds aren't real" is much more crazy 😬
Ομηρος Κασερης
the human size one is called ΤΕΧΝΟΠΤΕΡΑΚ
😮
This is already made, japan had these prototypes a couple yrs back ,
heads up new jersey
Right, but you should give it the ability to morph into a maximal
Tell me more...
Yeah, engineering is cool or whatever, but have you considered putting massive rocket engines on it and giving it a plastic dinosaur head
Horizon forbidden west here we come
Will our airlines feature planes like this in the future?
I doubt it - looks very uncomfortable from a pax viewpoint - but specialized operators like inspection, construction etc
Not entirely. Morphing structures get expensive and hard to maintain at large scales, and making big structures like the wings morph gets expensive. We might see tail-morphing planes that can make themselves pitch unstable for more efficient takeoff, maybe the outer wings can use twist morphing, but I wouldn't expect to see a completely bird-like morphing airliner. The upper limit is probably around the size of 1- or 2-seater planes, and the design makes more sense for things like package delivery drones.
Stable… as its oscillations amplitude increases
Same principle applied when they ask how to control a brick-shaped stealth plane.. computers made it.. pilot just command it.
Shouldn’t the safety tether be there as a backup and not a constant force under tension, thereby changing your model as something constantly fighting a diagonal upward force? Your bird isn’t even flying level.
So the pigeons getting charged on the powerlines are getting an upgrade.
The cia has had this figured out since the mid 1950s. By 75 all bird had been replaced by automatons
Finally I can fly like those in pub g and fortnite, hanging on robot eagle legs