The flight range of migrating birds depends crucially on the amount of fuel stored by the bird prior to migration or taken up en route at stop-over sites. However, an increase in body mass is associated with an increase in energetic costs, counteracting the benefit of fuel stores. Water imbalance, occurring when water loss exceeds metabolic water production, may constitute another less well rec...

Animal fliers frequently move through a variety of perturbed flows during their daily aerial routines. However, the extent to which these perturbations influence flight control and energetic expenditure is essentially unknown. Here, we evaluate the kinematic and metabolic consequences of flight within variably sized vortex shedding flows using five Anna's hummingbirds feeding from an artificial...

Insect wings do not contain intrinsic musculature to change shape, but rather bend and twist passively during flight. Some insect wings feature flexible joints along their veins that contain patches of resilin, a rubber-like protein. Bumblebee wings exhibit a central resilin joint (1m-cu) that has previously been shown to improve vertical force production during hovering flight. In this study, ...

The big brown bat, Eptesicus fuscus, uses echolocation for orientation and foraging, and scans its surroundings by aiming its sonar beam at obstacles and prey. All call parameters are highly adaptable and determine the bat's acoustic field of view and hence its perception of the echo scene. The intensity (source level) and directionality of the emitted calls directly contribute to the bat's aco...

The mechanisms of pigeon homing are still not understood, in particular how they determine their position at unfamiliar locations. The "gravity vector" theory holds that pigeons memorize the gravity vector at their home loft and deduct home direction and distance from the angular difference between memorized and actual gravity vector. However, the gravity vector is tilted by different densities...

During two parabolic flight campaigns, one with the NASA-KC-135, the second with the ESA Caravelle, human spatial orientation in an altered gravitational environment was studied by measuring the subjective visual vertical (SVV) by means of a luminous line, and by asking the subjects to give a report, with eyes closed, about their orientation to apparent vertical. The inflight data are compared ...

The paper concerns selected results from a vast Italian research project regarding calibration of GPS/IMU systems and the quality of direct georeferencing in photogrammetry. Thanks to Pavia's Test Site (PTS) and to a complex structure of flight data which was acquired above it, it is possible to perform rigorous and independent validation of results. This means: the possibility of calibrating o...

The purpose of this study was to quantify ball flight kinematics (ball speed, spin rate, spin axis orientation, seam orientation) and release location variability in the four most common pitch types in baseball and relate them to in-season pitching performance. Nine NCAA Division I pitchers threw four pitching variations (fastball, changeup, curveball, and slider) while a radar gun measured bal...

Large meteorite impacts cause great changes to geologic features on Earth, ranging from cratering and ejecta blankets to phase transformations in minerals. In this report we describe the effect of a shock wave on the crystallographic orientation of quartz crystals in quartzite from the Vredefort impact site in South Africa. Preferred orientation of bulk quartzite samples was measured by time-of...

This paper presents an adaptive guidance and control law algorithm for implementation on a pair of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in a 6 DOF leader-follower formation flight simulation. The objective of the simulation study is to prepare for a flight test involving a pair of UAVs in formation flight where the follower aircraft will be equipped with an onboard camera to estimate the relative di...