“How do you make a hinge? Look at a fruit fly.”
Princeton’s Bio-Inspired Adaptive Morphology (BAM) Laboratory, headed by Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Science and Engineering Department Aimy Wissa, is making ground in the emerging field of nature-inspired robotic design, from avian-influenced wingtips to energy-releasing actuators as seen in click beetles. Alongside seven graduate students, Wissa strives to gain understanding from natural feats of engineering in biology.
The two-story laboratory in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences houses testing systems including a wind tunnel, water channel, and a variety of 3D printers, all of which are used to investigate nature-driven solutions to engineering problems.
“Birds thrive in some environments where drones and small-scale uncrewed aerial vehicles would fail. Think of a really strong gust, or a very cluttered environment where birds can really thrive, but our drones and fixed-wing airplanes still struggle,” Wissa said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. “So we are trying to unlock some of these secrets and keys of physics that we can translate to our engineering.”
The BAM Lab studies three areas: avian-inspired flight, insect scale dynamics, and multimodal locomotion. For one paper published by Wissa, then-postdoc Girguis Sedky, and several graduate students in October 2024, the team studied the group of feathers on a bird called covert feathers, of which little is known about their significance on birds.
While studying the feathers, the group first had to determine if there was an aerodynamic benefit before they could suggest real-world applications. The team created a model with simplified wings and covert feather-like flaps which they tested inside a wind tunnel. The group found that the presence of these feathers helps to mitigate stall, or sudden loss of lift. The group also studied the significance of the placement of the feather-like flaps on a wing, finding the optimal placement to be near the front of the wing — exactly where they are in birds.
Previously, avian anatomy research has said these feathers play no role in flight. The lab’s research, however, showed their impact on flight.
“Can we actually implement it on an airplane in flight?” Wissa asked, pivoting the project to engineering applications.
After using the wind tunnel to determine the set of flaps needed, the group took a remote-control model airplane to the runway in the Forrestal Campus, located across Route 1 east of campus. Wissa found that the presence of the flaps made the plane less likely to stall and decreased the severity of stall when it did occur, making it easier for the plane to recover.
“Think about your package-delivering airplanes — even a little gust can be pretty substantial,” Wissa explained. “We’re now showing that these devices could be a very good stall mitigation device.”
Further applications of this concept include energy harvesting at high altitudes. The flaps were applied to a large kite, which the lab’s industry collaborator is using to convert jet streams into energy.
Wissa previously taught at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she initially set up the lab. There, she originally set out to examine birds and bird flight. In collaboration with other partners, she later began looking at insects and organisms that transition from one medium to another, like flying fish. Now at Princeton, the lab examines insect specimens directly, although it continues to outsource to collaborators who can work directly with vertebrates like birds.
Wissa has taught MAE 323: Aerospace Structures and MAE 416/516: Bioinspired Design at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. She will teach MAE 323 for the second year this spring.
In the Bioinspired Design courses, Wissa instructs students to look toward nature to help motivate a solution or product. Students then build a specific function of their design.
This year, Wissa hopes to expand her research into more novel systems, uniting several of her research areas and understanding the trade-offs nature has resolved in design, prioritizing different systems and functions. She explained how humans are easily capable of building single-function systems, but often struggle to engineer multiple functions.
Wissa hopes that nature has the solution.
Andrew Bosworth is the Research Editor for the ‘Prince.’
Please send corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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