ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2015
The role of passive avian head stabilization in flapping flight.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- New perspectives on head and neck allometry and ecomorphology in tetrapods.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Cam-Based Simple Design of Constant-Force Suspension Backpack to Isolate Dynamic Load.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Mechanism properties of a bird-neck bionic rigid-flexible structure.Fundamental research · 2024Article
- In Vivo Analysis of the Dynamic Motion Stability Characteristics of Geese's Neck.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Inflight head stabilization associated with wingbeat cycle and sonar emissions in the lingual echolocating Egyptian fruit bat, Rousettus aegyptiacus.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2021Article
- Evolutionary versatility of the avian neck.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The Critical Role of Head Movements for Spatial Representation During Bumblebees Learning Flight.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2020Article
- Optic flow cues help explain altitude control over sea in freely flying gulls.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2019Article
- Sensory gaze stabilization in echolocating bats.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- How lovebirds maneuver through lateral gusts with minimal visual information.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Birds invest wingbeats to keep a steady head and reap the ultimate benefits of flying together.PLoS biology · 2019Article
- Correlated evolution of neck length and leg length in birds.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- A Physical Model Suggests That Hip-Localized Balance Sense in Birds Improves State Estimation in Perching: Implications for Bipedal Robots.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2018Article
- Saccadic Movement Strategy in Common CuttlefishFrontiers in physiology · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Birds improve vision by stabilizing head position relative to their surroundings, while their body is forced up and down during flapping flight. Stabilization is facilitated by compensatory motion of the sophisticated avian head-neck system. While relative head motion has been studied in stationary and walking birds, little is known about how birds accomplish head stabilization during flapping flight. To unravel this, we approximate the avian neck with a linear mass-spring-damper system for vertical displacements, analogous to proven head stabilization models for walking humans. We corroborate the model's dimensionless natural frequency and damping ratios from high-speed video recordings of whooper swans (Cygnus cygnus) flying over a lake. The data show that flap-induced body oscillations can be passively attenuated through the neck. We find that the passive model robustly attenuates large body oscillations, even in response to head mass and gust perturbations. Our proof of principle shows that bird-inspired drones with flapping wings could record better images with a swan-inspired passive camera suspension.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.