This paper presents some recent improvements in the fabrication and control of the Micromechanical Flying Insect (MFI), a centimeter sized aerial vehicle currently being developed at the University of California, Berkeley. We report a lift of 506μN from a single wing, which is sufficient for a 100 mg machine to lift itself off the ground. This lift matches very well with predictions based on qu...

1 It is important to understand the role of individual differences in working memory capacity 2 (WMC). We investigated the relation between differences in WMC and N1 in event-related 3 brain potentials as a measure of early selective attention for an auditory distractor in 4 three-stimulus oddball tasks that required minimum memory. A high-WMC group (n = 13) 5 showed a smaller N1 in response to...

The present paper investigated the event-related brain potential correlates of the processing of word stress related acoustic changes. We studied the processing of non-speech stimuli containing similar intensity and f0 changes as speech stimuli in a passive oddball paradigm. Contrary to our previous results using speech stimuli with a trochaic stress pattern contrasted with a iambic stress patt...

BACKGROUND A major reservoir of Nipah virus is believed to be the flying fox genus Pteropus, a fruit bat distributed across many of the world's tropical and sub-tropical areas. The emergence of the virus and its zoonotic transmission to livestock and humans have been linked to losses in the bat's habitat. Nipah has been identified in a number of indigenous flying fox populations in Thailand. Wh...

Flying squirrels are well known for their ability to glide between trees at the top of a forest canopy. We present experimental performance and behavioural evidence that flight in flying squirrels may have evolved out of a need to control landing forces. Northern flying squirrels were filmed jumping from a horizontal branch to a much larger vertical pole. These were both slightly compliant (les...

This dissertation presents voltage stabilization techniques for flying capacitors used in soft-switching multilevel active power filters. The proposed active filter has proved to be a solution for power system harmonics produced by static high power converters. However, voltage unbalance of the clamping capacitors in the active filter in practical applications was observed due to its unequal pa...

PRISMA will demonstrate Guidance, Navigation, and Control strategies for advanced autonomous formation flying. The Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) is the prime contractor for the project which is funded by the Swedish National Space Board (SNSB). The mission consists of two spacecraft: MAIN and TARGET. The MAIN satellite has full orbit control capability while TARGET is attitude controlled only...

Bats of the genus Pteropus (flying-foxes) are the natural host of Hendra virus (HeV) which periodically causes fatal disease in horses and humans in Australia. The increased urban presence of flying-foxes often provokes negative community sentiments because of reduced social amenity and concerns of HeV exposure risk, and has resulted in calls for the dispersal of urban flying-fox roosts. Howeve...

Bird strikes present a huge risk for aircraft, especially since traditional airport bird surveillance is mainly dependent on inefficient human observation. Computer vision based technology has been proposed to automatically detect birds, determine bird flying trajectories, and predict aircraft takeoff delays. However, the characteristics of bird flight using imagery and the performance of exist...

Formation flying is an enabling technology for many future space missions. This paper presents an MPC controller that uses dynamics based on a modified version of Gauss’ Variational Equations which incorporates osculating J2 effects. A linear parameter-varying version of existing dynamics is developed, creating a highly accurate model that can easily be embedded in the MPC controller design. Th...