INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
The incredible agility of the common house or fruit fly puts every drone and robot to shame, but devices inspired by them are beginning to
A new four-winged flapping robot not only successfully imitates the fruit fly hyper-agile flying method, but can travel for up to a
kilometer before running out of juice.
Robotics researchers at the Delft University of Technology wanted to create a flying platform that
could imitate and test theories on how insects fly the way they do, but without tethers or non-animal propulsion like propellers.
It not
just that they want a cool robot: The way insects respond to things like gusts of wind or an imminent slapping hand demonstrate incredible
reaction times and control feedback, things that could inform autonomous craft like drones or even small airplanes
Wouldn''t it be nice to know your jet could autonomously and smoothly dodge a lightning bolt
The trouble is that when you get much bigger
than an insect, that method of flying doesn''t always work any more due to the differences in mass, drag and so on
As the researchers put it in their paper, which made the cover of Science:
Because of technological challenges arising from stringent weight
and size restrictions, most existing designs cannot match the flight performance of their biological counterparts; they lack the necessary
agility, sufficient power to take off, or sufficient energy to fly for more than a minute.
Not only that, but tiny robots like the Robobee
require a wired power connection, and other tiny flapping craft require manual piloting
Can''t have that! So rather than slavishly imitate the biology of a single animal, the team focused on how to achieve similar flight
characteristics at a realistic scale.
The four-winged, tailless style of their creation, the DelFly Nimble, is novel but evidently
Their robot can go 7 meters per second, or about 15 MPH, hover in place or perform all kinds of extreme motions like dives and rolls
It no joke doing that using rotors with continuous thrust, let alone via coordinated wing movement
You can see it perform a few more capers in the video here.
Perhaps most amazing is its range; the robot can travel for a kilometer on a
That sort of spec is the kind that military RD directors love to hear about.
But the DelFly Nimble is already producing interesting
scientific data, as lead researcher Matěj Karásek explains:
In contrast to animal experiments, we were in full control of what was
happening in the robot ‘brain.& This allowed us to identify and describe a new passive aerodynamic mechanism that assists the flies, but
possibly also other flying animals, in steering their direction throughout these rapid banked turns.
Development is continuing, and no doubt
biologists and three-letter agencies have tendered letters of interest to the Dutch inventors.
