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The German industrial control and automation company Festo [0] created a bionic swift [1] as an engineering demo this year. The flapping wings are no longer as
by _Microft 5y ago
The German industrial control and automation company Festo [0] created a bionic swift [1] as an engineering demo this year. The flapping wings are no longer as rigid as in their earlier flapping bird model [2]. Go and check out their other stuff (e.g. a dragonfly: [3], a flying fox or aquatic animals), it's great! Here is a Youtube search for Festo Animals for your convenience [4].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festo
[1] BionicSwift: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUE8o056Cpc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUE8o056Cpc
[2] SmartBird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnR8fDW3Ilo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnR8fDW3Ilo
[3] Dragonfly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj1yhz5io20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj1yhz5io20
[4] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Festo+Animals https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Festo+Animals
- elihu 5y agoReminds me of Tyrell Corporation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSOzdFoZsho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSOzdFoZsho
- dvh 5y agoHow does that make you feel?
- audiometry 5y agoLet me tell you how it makes me feel.
- tunnuz 5y agoDo you like our owl?
- k__ 5y agoA friend of mine lives a few cities from a Festo factory. She didn't know what they build, but she always said the name Festo sounds like being an evil corp in a scifi story. She was a bit shook, when I told her about the robots, haha
- aj7 5y agoMy friend, the late Michael Polatnick, coined a word to describe your friend. “Stupido.” Festo got big making pneumatic devices and grippers, parts that are used in almost every automated factory. And almost every mechanical engineer involved with mechanisms knows of Festo.
- pengaru 5y agoHate to break it to you but "stupido" is conventional Italian for stupid/idiot. https://translate.google.com/?sl=it&tl=en&text=stupido&op=translate https://translate.google.com/?sl=it&tl=en&text=stupido&op=tr...
- einpoklum 5y agoThis is very impressive. However - is there not a problem of scale? As you scale, surface area is squared, but mass is cubed. I mean, ok, you could have a lighter central fuselage, but then how effective can this be in carrying passengers or cargo?
- lugged 5y agoBigger wings?
- Sharlin 5y agoBigger wings means heavier wings, and greater torque needed to actuate the wings, which means more power needed as well as greater stresses involved, all of which means even more mass, which eats into your payload budget.
- _Microft 5y agoPlanes aren't filled solidly, though. They are more like a shell around a volume, so I'd think the mass would rather scale like the surface area than the volume of the plane. Beside that, I would agree that it seems impossible to get such a solution working in dimensions of dozens of meters. A pun: maybe they just took "do things that don't scale" too literally? ;)