Variable Aerodynamic Damping via Co-Contraction: A Dynamic Isomorphism with Variable Stiffness Actuators

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07292v1
• Date: Fri, 08 May 2026 06:02:34 GMT
• Title: Variable Aerodynamic Damping via Co-Contraction: A Dynamic Isomorphism with Variable Stiffness Actuators
• Abstract summary: We prove that aerodynamic co-contraction in a redundant dual-rotor actuator can tune a passive, trim-defined aero-mechanical damping.<n>The same fiber-density principle also enhances the active aerodynamic promptness measure of redundant multirotors.
• Score: 3.919116384604024
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: We prove that aerodynamic co-contraction in a redundant dual-rotor actuator can tune a passive, trim-defined aero-mechanical damping while keeping the commanded net force constant. In particular, we define an incremental damping coefficient as the local sensitivity of net thrust to air-relative velocity at a trim and prove that it increases monotonically along constant-force fibers under a mild aerodynamic hardening condition. We then validate the required damping and hardening properties from a first-principles Blade Element Theory derivation, which yields a minimal thrust model affine in inflow and explicitly reveals the speed--inflow coupling driving the effect. The resulting mechanism is formalized as a Variable Aerodynamic Damping Actuator (VADA) and shown to be dynamically isomorphic to stiffness modulation in antagonistic variable-stiffness actuation (VSA), similar to the co-contraction of tendons by muscle co-activation. The same fiber-density principle also enhances the active aerodynamic promptness measure of redundant multirotors. Finally, an impedance-form representation clarifies the roles of common-mode and differential-mode actuation in the control of passive impedance and the equilibrium velocity of the VADA system.

Related papers

• Active Stiffness Control of a Supportive Continuum Robot [0.764671395172401]
  Supportive continuum robots (SCRs) enhance the load-bearing capability of an operative continuum robot by mechanically coupling it with a supportive arm.<n>Active stiffness control is needed to regulate the load response and maintain positioning accuracy.<n>This paper presents an active task-space stiffness control framework for a tendon-driven SCR.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-08-04T13:51:05Z)
• Controlled Dynamics Attractor Transformer [58.15454173718687]
  Transformer architectures have advanced representation learning and inference in deep models through self-attention mechanisms.<n>In parallel,associative memory (AM) frameworks map representations onto energy landscapes, offering interpretable retrieval mechanisms.<n>We propose Controlled Dynamics Attractor Transformer (CCAT), which couples a mixture von Mises-Fisher (Mo-vMF) attention energy with a Hopfield refinement energy.<n>CCAT achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks in graph anomaly detection and graph classification.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-06-13T09:04:22Z)
• Aero-Promptness: Drag-Aware Aerodynamic Manipulability for Propeller-driven Vehicles [3.919116384604024]
  The Drag-Aware Aerodynamic Manipulability (DAAM) is a geometric framework for control allocation in redundant multirotors.<n>We geometrically characterize the global jump discontinuities that inevitably arise from physical actuator limits and spin-rate sign transitions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-03-09T06:02:59Z)
• Physics-Embedded Neural ODEs for Learning Antagonistic Pneumatic Artificial Muscle Dynamics [2.8169681659450876]
  Pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) enable compliant actuation for soft wearable, assistive, and interactive robots.<n>This paper presents a hybrid neural ordinary differential equation framework that embeds physical structure into a learned model of antagonistic PAM dynamics.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-27T04:38:22Z)
• Dual-Regime Hybrid Aerodynamic Modeling of Winged Blimps With Neural Mixing [22.07080402182441]
  Winged blimps operate across distinct aerodynamic regimes that cannot be adequately captured by a single model.<n>This paper presents a hybrid aerodynamic modeling framework that integrates a fixed-wing Aerodynamic Coupling Model (ACM) and a Generalized Drag Model (GDM)<n>The proposed approach is validated on the RGBlimp platform through a large-scale experimental campaign comprising 1,320 real-world flight trajectories.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-25T08:59:50Z)
• Muscle Coactivation in the Sky: Geometry and Pareto Optimality of Energy vs. Promptness in Multirotors [3.919116384604024]
  We show that the limited torque of the motors and the nonlinear aerodynamic map from rotor speed to thrust naturally give rise to the novel concept of promptness.<n>By treating energy consumption as a competing objective, we turn redundancy resolution into a principled multi-objective program on affine fibers.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-15T16:35:46Z)
• Adaptive Visual Autoregressive Acceleration via Dual-Linkage Entropy Analysis [50.48301331112126]
  We propose NOVA, a training-free token reduction acceleration framework for Visual AutoRegressive modeling.<n>NOVA adaptively determines the acceleration activation scale during inference by online identifying the inflection point of scale entropy growth.<n>Experiments and analyses validate NOVA as a simple yet effective training-free acceleration framework.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-01T17:29:42Z)
• DSO-VSA: a Variable Stiffness Actuator with Decoupled Stiffness and Output Characteristics for Rehabilitation Robotics [11.174959557114532]
  This paper presents a variable stiffness actuator featuring decoupled stiffness and output behavior for rehabilitation robotics.<n>The system integrates a variable stiffness mechanism that combines a variable-length lever with a hypocycloidal straight-line mechanism to achieve a linear torque-deflection relationship.<n>A cascade PI controller is further developed on the basis of the differential configuration, in which the position-loop term jointly regulates stiffness and deflection angle.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-12-21T12:13:17Z)
• REWIND: Real-Time Egocentric Whole-Body Motion Diffusion with Exemplar-Based Identity Conditioning [95.07708090428814]
  We present REWIND, a one-step diffusion model for real-time, high-fidelity human motion estimation from egocentric image inputs.<n>We introduce cascaded body-hand denoising diffusion, which effectively models the correlation between egocentric body and hand motions.<n>We also propose a novel identity conditioning method based on a small set of pose exemplars of the target identity, which further enhances motion estimation quality.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-04-07T11:44:11Z)
• Visualizing Dynamics of Charges and Strings in (2+1)D Lattice Gauge Theories [103.95523007319937]
  Lattice gauge theories (LGTs) can be employed to understand a wide range of phenomena.<n>Here, we investigate the dynamics of local excitations in a $mathZ$ LGT using a two-dimensional lattice of superconducting qubits.<n>Our method allows us to experimentally image string dynamics in a (2+1)D LGT from which we uncover two distinct regimes.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-09-25T17:59:05Z)
• Euclideanizing Flows: Diffeomorphic Reduction for Learning Stable Dynamical Systems [74.80320120264459]
  We present an approach to learn such motions from a limited number of human demonstrations. The complex motions are encoded as rollouts of a stable dynamical system. The efficacy of this approach is demonstrated through validation on an established benchmark as well demonstrations collected on a real-world robotic system.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-05-27T03:51:57Z)
• Cat states in a driven superfluid: role of signal shape and switching protocol [62.997667081978825]
  We investigate the behavior of a one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model whose kinetic energy is made to oscillate with zero time-average. We analyze the robustness of this unconventional ground state against variations of a number of system parameters.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-05-11T15:15:06Z)
• Switching dynamics of single and coupled VO2-based oscillators as elements of neural networks [55.41644538483948]
  We report on the switching dynamics of both single and coupled VO2-based oscillators, with resistive and capacitive coupling, and explore the capability of their application in neural networks. For the resistive coupling, it is shown that synchronization takes place at a certain value of the coupling resistance, though it is unstable and a synchronization failure occurs periodically. For the capacitive coupling, two synchronization modes, with weak and strong coupling, are found. The transition between these modes is accompanied by chaotic oscillations.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-01-07T02:16:04Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.