View source for Flight dynamics and control of evasive maneuvers: the fruit fly's takeoff

{{HTDB paper
| authors = Francisco A Zabala, Gwyneth M Card, Ebraheem I Fontaine, Michael H Dickinson, Richard M Murray
| title = Flight dynamics and control of evasive maneuvers: the fruit fly's takeoff
| source = IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 56(9), 2009 (To appear)
| year = 2009
| type = Preprint
| funding = 
| url = http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~murray/preprints/zab+09-tbme.pdf
| abstract = We have approached the problem of reverse engineering the flight control mechanism of the fruit fly by studying the dynamics of the responses to a visual stimulus during takeoff. Building upon a prior framework we seek to understand the strategies employed by the animal to stabilize attitude and orientation during these evasive, highly dynamical maneuvers. As a first step, we consider the dynamics from a gray-box perspective: examining lumped forces produced by the insect's legs and wings. The reconstruction of the flight initiation dynamics, based on the unconstrained motion formulation for a rigid body, allows us to assess the fly's responses to a variety of initial conditions induced by its jump.  Such assessment permits refinement by using a visual tracking algorithm to extract the kinematic envelope of the wings in order to estimate lift and drag forces, and recording actual leg-joint kinematics and using them to estimate jump forces. In this paper we present the details of our approach in a comprehensive manner including the salient results. 
| flags = 
| tag = zab+09-tbme
| id = 2009g
}}