Universal Extremum Seeking Mechanism for Lift Variation in Soaring Birds Flight: A New Paradigm in Computational Physics and Biology

arXiv:2605.20232v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this letter, we reveal a universal, very simple extremum seeking natural feedback law and mechanism that governs, adapts, and generates in real-time, optimized lift variations for successful energy gain flight in presence of wind shear. The introduced law/mechanism, which is computationally minimal and needs only sensory information of the wind or local energy rate (i.e., model-free and data-driven) is able to characterize and replicate dynamic soaring optimized flight physics of windward climb in real-time for a variety of soaring birds species, namely wandering albatross, black-browed albatross and grey-headed albatross. We confirm the effectiveness of this new simple, real-time law by successful comparisons with sophisticated non-real-time optimal control solver and reported biological data. Our results establish the proposed mechanism as a new paradigm in soaring flight physics. That is, our results substantially advance the computational physics/biology aspects of the problem while providing a biologically plausible theory for avian soaring behavior.