Bird-inspired reflexive morphing enables rudderless flight

Abstract

Gliding birds lack a vertical tail, yet they fly stably rudderless in turbulence without needing discrete flaps to steer. In contrast, nearly all airplanes need vertical tails to damp Dutch roll oscillations and to control yaw. The few exceptions that lack a vertical tail either leverage differential drag-based yaw actuators or their fixed planforms are carefully tuned for passively stable Dutch roll and proverse yaw. Biologists hypothesize that birds stabilize and control gliding flight without rudders by using their wing and tail reflexes, but no rudderless airplane has a morphing wing or tail that can change shape like a bird. Our rudderless biohybrid robot, PigeonBot II, can damp its Dutch roll instability (caused by lacking a vertical tail) and control flight by morphing its biomimetic wing and tail reflexively like a bird. The bird-inspired adaptive reflexive controller was tuned in a wind tunnel to mitigate turbulent perturbations, which enabled PigeonBot II to fly autonomously in the atmosphere with pigeon-like poses. This work is a mechanistic confirmation of how birds accomplish rudderless flight via reflex functions, and it can inspire rudderless aircraft with reduced radar signature and increased efficacy.