Universal Extremum Seeking Mechanism for Lift Variation in Soaring Birds Flight: A New Paradigm in Computational Physics and Biology

TL;DR

This paper introduces a universal, simple extremum seeking feedback law that enables real-time, optimized lift variation in soaring birds, advancing understanding in both physics and biology.

Contribution

It presents a novel, minimal computational mechanism for real-time energy-efficient soaring, applicable across multiple bird species, and validated against biological data and optimal control models.

Findings

Successfully replicates bird soaring physics in real-time

Outperforms traditional non-real-time optimal control methods

Provides a biologically plausible model for avian soaring behavior

Abstract

In this letter, we reveal a universal, very simple extremum seeking natural feedback law and mechanism that governs, adapts, and generates in real-time, optimized lift variations for successful energy gain flight in presence of wind shear. The introduced law/mechanism, which is computationally minimal and needs only sensory information of the wind or local energy rate (i.e., model-free and data-driven) is able to characterize and replicate dynamic soaring optimized flight physics of windward climb in real-time for a variety of soaring birds species, namely wandering albatross, black-browed albatross and grey-headed albatross. We confirm the effectiveness of this new simple, real-time law by successful comparisons with sophisticated non-real-time optimal control solver and reported biological data. Our results establish the proposed mechanism as a new paradigm in soaring flight physics. That is, our results substantially advance the computational physics/biology aspects of the problem while providing a biologically plausible theory for avian soaring behavior.