Flying and gliding animals, including insects, birds, bats, and even lizards and snakes, have remarkable abilities for executing rapid maneuvers and for maintaining flight stability when perturbed by environmental factors. These capabilities form the basis of a wide variety of ecologically important flight behaviors, including escaping from predators, gathering food, and competing for mates. A comprehensive understanding of animal flight stability and control requires integrated experiments on freely flying animals responding to in-flight perturbations or generating self-motivated maneuvers, and demands quantification of the resulting three-dimensional flow around the free-flying animal.
Overcoming limitations of existing technologies, this project will develop a novel tomographic velocimetry technique for measuring three-dimensional fluid flow around freely flying animals. The aims for this new method are to provide more than five-orders-of-magnitude improvement in computational efficiency, improved flow field measurement accuracy, and an increased ease of use. Once developed, the technique and associated methodology and analysis tools will be freely distributed to the biological and engineering sciences communities.
This project will provide a transformative leap in the experimentation and instrumentation technology required to comprehensively investigate animal aerial locomotion. The new tools will enable the investigation of flight dynamics and fascinating aerial behaviors that so far have been elusive or poorly understood, and could ultimately help to answer ecological and evolutionary questions. The advancements in three-dimensional flow imaging developed here will also contribute to other areas of biology and beyond, impacting numerous research areas that touch upon fluid mechanics. The broader dissemination of the developed tools as an open-source software will provide wide accessibility to researchers and offer a platform for sustainable development.
The proposed work includes educational and outreach efforts at multiple levels. At the university level, the material developed here will serve as a basis for new courses on animal locomotion and will support the development of a university-wide research program at the interface of the biological and engineering sciences. Moreover, this project will support primary and secondary level education by working with public school teachers in under-resourced classrooms to develop novel lessons that integrate biology and engineering in a way that captures student imaginations. The results of this effort will be disseminated nationally and internationally via entertaining, freely accessible videos.
