Special Session 3: Innovation in Flight Vehicles & Low-Altitude Mobility 

This minisymposium explores advances in innovative flight vehicles and low-altitude mobility, integrating aerodynamics, intelligent control, lightweight structures, and operational safety. It brings together researchers and engineering experts to share recent developments in bio-inspired flapping-wing aircraft, electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, and small UAVs. Topics span fundamental flight mechanisms, aircraft design, computational fluid dynamics, wind tunnel testing, flight dynamics, intelligent sensing, autonomous control, and low-altitude airspace management. Discussions address key challenges in aerodynamic efficiency, endurance, noise reduction, safety, and adaptability to complex environments. By connecting fundamental research with engineering applications, the session provides an interdisciplinary forum for technical exchange and collaboration to advance next-generation low-altitude flight systems.

Chairs

Assoc. Prof. Xiaozhou Fan

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Xiaozhou Fan is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). His research focuses on unsteady aerodynamics, bio-inspired robotics, and data-driven flow sensing and flight control. During his postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology, he was supervised by Morteza Gharib. He received his PhD from Brown University, where he was advised by Kenneth Breuer and Sharon Swartz. As first author, he has published in journals such as Journal of the Royal Society Interface and AIAA Journal, and has presented at multiple top robotic conferences such as IROS and ICRA, and holds one granted U.S. invention patent. During his PhD studies, he received a $200,000 award from the Hyundai Visionary Challenge. His research has been featured in National da vinci's dream the secrets of flight.

Project Engineer Qing Zhang

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Qing Zhang is currently a Project Engineer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). His research focuses on bionic flight vehicles, low-altitude intelligent platforms and aerodynamics. He has long been engaged in multi-degree-of-freedom mechanism design, flow field measurement and CFD simulation of flapping-wing aircraft. He has accumulated extensive experience in wind tunnel testing, flight dynamics modelling and aircraft performance optimization. He keeps tackling core technologies for next-generation low-altitude flight systems, devoting himself to advancing theoretical innovation and engineering prototype development of bionic flight, and facilitating cross-disciplinary technical collaboration.