AERODYNAMIC TESTING OF A FLYING HUMANOID ROBOT: DAER’S CONTRIBUTION TO A WIND TUNNEL CAMPAIGN

The Aerodynamics Laboratory of the Department of Aerospace Science and Technology at the Politecnico di Milano (DAER) was involved within a collaboration with Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in a comprehensive wind tunnel campaign on a full-scale flying humanoid robot.

Several challenges concerning the test of this unconventional model were addressed thanks to the participation of DAER staff to the design of the experimental set up.

DAER experience on rotorcraft wind tunnel testing enabled to successfully address the need of resembling during the tests the flight attitudes of the humanoid robot characterised by high incidence and sideslip angles.

Moreover, the humanoid robot required hardware modifications for wind tunnel experiments for precise aerodynamic forces and surface pressure measurements.

The comprehensive experimental data set obtained from the wind tunnel campaign were used by Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia to validate a CFD framework for the calculation of the aerodynamic forces acting on the flying robot, enabling the training of a Deep Neural Network and a linear regression model.

These models were integrated into a simulator for designing aerodynamic-aware controllers, validated through flight simulations and balancing experiments on the robot physical prototype.

A new article published on Nature - Communication Engineeering, described the results of this work including authors from several institutes. 

Read the full article at https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-025-00447-w