Robot Birds
Well, this is just creepy. Right after I got done with the last post about the increasing use of drones over the United States, I come across this article. It seems some Dutch engineering students have come up with a design for robotic birds that they plan to build to enter into a competition. Eventually, such robo-birds could be use for surveillance.
The team, from Delft and the Department of Experimental Zoology of Wageningen University in The Netherlands, based the design on recent findings on the common swift’s flight features, as detailed in an April issue of the journal Nature.
During its lifetime, a common swift can fly up to five times the distance to the moon and back, or more than 2 million miles (more than 3 million kilometers). The Nature study found the common swift is able to endure the distance by constantly morphing its wings in response to the prevailing flight conditions.
By folding its feathers over one another and sweeping them back and forth, the bird changes its wing shape and the surface area exposed to the elements. The feathery adjustments boost flight efficiency and maneuverability.
If it works as designed (it appears that no real prototype has been built yet) the first evolution of these things would be capable of about an hour's worth of time in the air. But the truly radical shape-changing wings mean the darn things will be highly maneuverable. In a few years time, you might have to start wondering if that bird watching you is a bird at all.
Animals, Machines, World news | Gaius July 20, 2007
By sam, July 20, 2007 @ 1:19 pm
If you have ever seen the movie “The Incredibles”, then robotic surveillance birds look like.