Direct Learning of Home Vector Direction: Incited by Existing Insect-Inspired Approaches for Local Navigation and Wayfinding

Insects have long been recognized for their ability to navigate and return home using visual cues from their nest’s environment. However, the precise mechanism underlying this remarkable homing skill remains a subject of ongoing investigation. Drawing inspiration from the learning flights of honey bees and wasps, we propose a robot navigation...

Lessons from natural flight for aviation: then, now and tomorrow

Powered flight was once a capability limited only to animals, but by identifying useful attributes of animal flight and building on these with technological advances, engineers have pushed the frontiers of flight beyond our predecessors’ wildest imaginations. Yet, there remain many key characteristics of biological flight that elude current...

Food in motion: Lively display of freshness or last spasms of living beings?

The movement of food may suggest the food is very fresh but may also indicate the source of food is still alive. In this study, we explore the responses that different kinds of food movements can evoke among consumers. In an online study, we presented participants with 14 videos in which a food product changed shape or moved, before or while...

Turning nuisance into nutrition: Performance based parametric design of an automated warehouse in an insect rearing system

This thesis project features a design method of an automated warehouse in an insect rearing system, where pallets are transported from storage to a feeding machine and back into storage. From seven material handling equipment concepts, the most promising concepts are selected through a combined expert panel evaluation of 7 criteria and a basic...

Shape Optimization of a Flapping Wing for the Atalanta Project FWMAV

Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicle (FWMAV) technologies are emerging due to the vast number of applications that they can be utilized in. Researchers and scientists are constantly seeking to push the boundaries to the extreme in terms of miniaturization of this technology, making it smaller, lighter and better performing. In order to achieve this...

The Role of Insects in Medical Engineering and Bionics: Towards Entomomedical Engineering

Insects are important agents in ecosystems. Their diverseness and developed coping mechanisms also make them interesting for direct application and as a source of inspiration in medical engineering. We summarized the main contribution of insects in biomedical applications. Medical centers in North America, and Europe use fly larvae for maggot...

Monocular Optical Flow based Attitude Estimation in Micro Aerial Vehicles: A Bio-Inspired Approach

The exceptional flight capabilities of insects have long amazed and inspired researchers and roboticists striving to make Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) smaller and more agile. It is well known that optical flow plays a prominent role in insect flight control and navigation, and hence it is being increasingly investigated for applications in...

The 2050 Green Efficiency: An insect-based ecology center

Consider the “efficiency” both in the physical and psychological way to value the residents’<br/>meaningful encounters with nature and build a future-proof green intervention which will last for a long-term and explore green innovations in architecture. I designed a public building as an insect-based ecology center as the ‘gate’ of the Noorder...

Cambodian Delights: A multi-cultural exploration into the acceptation of insects as ingredients

This master thesis project describes the process of the designing of a model that offers a way to improve the acceptation of insects as ingredients.<br/>The final designs show an answer to the assignment: a product or product service combination, which contributes to increasing (multi contextual) insect consumption by improving the acceptation ...

Visual Homing for Micro Aerial Vehicles using Scene Familiarity

Autonomous navigation is a major challenge in the development of MAVs. When an algorithm has to be efficient, insect intelligence can be a source of inspiration. An elementary navigation task is homing, which means autonomously returning to the initial location. A promising approach makes use of visual familiarity of a route to determine...

Entomeals: The development of an insect cooking kit; enabling users to experiment with edible insects

The world population is growing rapidly and guaranteeing future food security is going to be one of the challenges of the future. Current food sources that provide a complete amino acid profile include meat and various meat-products. However, these often have a high negative impact on the environment and cost a lot of resources to produce. We...

Insects as a sustainable alternative to feed animals in the city

Insects can be alternative source of nutrients in various parts of the food-chain, as feed for livestock but also human consumption. However, the acceptation of insects as a source of nutrients is low. Insects are in no way a part of western culture except when they are a pest. Insects do play a vital role in upcoming developments such as urban...

Dynamic Modeling of a Rotating Insect Wing

A dynamic model of an insect wing is developed treating the wing as a deformable body subject to three-dimensional finite rotation about a fixed point at the base of the wing. Discretization of a stationary wing is conducted via finite element analysis to determine the natural frequencies and mode shapes of the wing. By formulating and...

Welcoming Insects at the Table: Designing a new Experience of eating Insects

This thesis documents the process of designing a new experience of eating insects for Westerners. By using the ViP approach, a research phase was carried out which revealed topics into food acceptance and choice, and the relationship between food, biology, psychology, and culture. Interviews were conducted to find out what people think of eating...

Insect-inspired wing actuation structures based on ring-type resonators

In this paper, we illustrate and study the opportunities of resonant ring type structures as wing actuation mechanisms for a flapping wing Micro Air Vehicle (MAV). Various design alternatives are presented and studied based on computational and physical models. Insects provide an excellent source of inspiration for the development of the wing...