Xinyan Deng , Ph.D.

Assistant Professor ,
Director, The Biorobotics Laboratory,
130 Academy St, Newark
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
University of Delaware,19716 USA
Phone: (302) 831-4464
Fax: (302) 831-3619
Email: deng@udel.edu

NEWS

• April 10, 2009
  Paper on scaling of animal turning appeared in Science; Media coverages in Science news and podcast; Nature highlights; Discovery magazine; UDaily; Washington Post, Boston Globe, etc.

• January 07, 2009
  Papers on flexible wing aerodynamics, dragonfly aerodynamics, and fruit fly saccade dynamics accepted to be presented in ICRA 2009.

• January 15, 2008
  Aaron won the Department Nowinski Award for undergraduate research (awarded to the best undergraduate researcher annually).

• November 16, 2007
  Aliza and Raymond won the NASA Summer Scholars Awards for Excellence in Research.

• January 15, 2006
  Xinyan Deng received NSF CAREER Award.

INTRODUCTION

Our research interest is centered around biological locomotion and bio-inspired robots, from investigating the underlying principles of aerial and aquatic locomotion to the construction and control of intelligent machines for similar tasks or environments. We are particularly interested in insect flight and fish locomotion.

We use experimental apparatus and mathematical analaysis to reveal the physical principles of flapping flight, its fundamental fluid mechanism, and flight dynamics and control. Our current projects include: aerodynamics of flexible wings; passive stability in insect flight; wing-wing interaction in dragonflies; dragonfly robot development; the stability and control of robotic fish.

Learn more about our research >>