Floris van Breugel
California Institute of Technology, University of Nevada, Reno
Papers
4
Total Citations
117
H-Index
4
About
Floris van Breugel is a leading researcher at the intersection of biology and robotics, specializing in bio-inspired vision, sensorimotor control, and flight dynamics. His work primarily focuses on understanding how insects, particularly flies and honeybees, navigate complex environments using minimal sensory information, and translating those principles into robotic systems. A major contribution is his pioneering research on monocular distance estimation from optic flow during active landing maneuvers (68 citations), which revealed how insects estimate distance without stereopsis. He also developed a dynamically-scaled robotic fly to uncover strategies for stabilizing forward flapping flight (24 citations), providing critical insights into how wing kinematics regulate speed. More recently, van Breugel has advanced the field by showing how insects estimate absolute ground velocity by combining optic flow with acceleration information (16 citations), and by analyzing how uncalibrated sensors can estimate ambient wind direction (9 citations), inspired by insect neural encoding. His work uniquely bridges biology and engineering, offering elegant solutions for autonomous robots operating in GPS-denied environments.
Research Focus
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Top Papers
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