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Foundations of Robotics
Seminar, September 29, 2009
Time
and Place | Seminar Abstract
Structure in Flying Vertebrates: Movement in Unpredictable Environments
Michael Habib
Department of Biology
Chatham College
NSH 1507
Talk 4:30 pm
Prior experimental data has indicated that flying animals operate at safety factors much greater than those generally used in manufactured flying vehicles. However, comparative data on the range of structural strengths represented by living flyers, and their correlations with specific modes of movement, are considerably less common in the literature. Flying animals may provide insights for robotic design, especially with regards to micro air vehicles, but also for any systems designed to move in unpredictable environments with strict weight requirements. Birds, bats, and pterosaurs all demonstrate a wide array of adaptations related to maintaining structural integrity in unpredictable environments. In this talk, I will present the results of my recent work on the skeletal rigidity in the wings and hind limbs of a wide range of flying species. I place special emphasis on pterosaurs, which have often been overlooked in biomechanical analyses because they have no living representatives. Despite being an enigmatic fossil group, pterosaurs provide numerous insights regarding weight distribution, passive load accommodation, and multi-purpose limb systems. Pterosaurs are especially informative for understanding the size limits of flapping flyers (as in the construction of ornithopters), as they included the largest known flying animals. I will supply evidence that pterosaur forelimbs acted as a multi-purpose module, supplying both aerodynamic force in flight and acting as a primary launching module, by supplying leaping force, when entering flight from the ground. I will further demonstrate that failure loads in the forelimb of living birds encompass a nearly seven-fold range, while bats are considerably more constrained, and utilize less rigid wing skeletons. Finally, adaptations to outboard stall reduction and gust alleviation will be considered.
The Robotics Institute is part of the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.