Also interesting are the robobees, currently being developed at Harvard. The March, 2013, issue of Scientific American has an article on this and the website has videos of both a tethered flight and the manufacturing process:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=robobees-takes-off&WT.mc_id=SA_printmag_2013-03
A robobee has a mass of just 100 milligrams and a wingspan just over the diameter of a 50 cent coin. Current battery technology would allow flights only of a few tens of seconds so robobees are now flown tethered with external power.
The robobees weight and size beats the lightest EZB's.
LP
--- In Indoor_Construction_at_yahoogroups.com, "John Kagan" <john_kagan@...> wrote:
>
> --- In Indoor_Construction_at_yahoogroups.com, joshuawfinn@ wrote:
> >
> >
> > Now let's get back to the topic. That dragonfly is some amazing engineering. What kind of control system are they using on it?
> >
>
> Based on the info on the website, it looks like control is via flapping rate, wing rotation, and head/tail movement. They indicate that it is fly-by-wire - i.e. it has a gyro or something to provide stable/autonomous flight, and that the controls just tell it where to go. Pretty impressive case of building on previous developments.
>
> I'm surprised to see that is is 175 grams. That sounds like a lot of weight to support with those small flappers.
>
> There are two categories of comments under the video that I find particularly amusing:
>
> 1) the people saying "fake". It certainly is getting harder these days to sort out real vs. fake (remember the flapping wing backpack with the Wii controller?) - however with Festo's other achievements I think it is pretty safe to believe them here.
>
> 2) the people who say "what practical value does this have?" and "it is just a pointless toy". I saw the same comments under the HPV helicopter videos. You'd think that with all the great new technology we have people would have a better understanding of how new ideas develop.
>
Received on Wed Apr 03 2013 - 11:32:54 CEST