Mechanical Butterflies?

MImeKillEr writes "According to an article on BBC News, two researchers from Oxford took highspeed photographs of an Admiral butterfly in a specially-designed windtunnel to study how butterflies fly. The resulting research brings insight into small-scale flight dynamics. Although the article doesn't give an ETA on this, they expect to be able to build an aircraft with a 10cm wingspan that will be either autonomous or radio controlled. This will allow them to be used in rescue missions, cave exploration and possibly even on Mars."

Comments

mechanical birds = ornithopters

[olip]

funniest thing I saw
but really hard to fly : planes with flapping wings
this technology is today where fixed wing tech war one century ago (ie a few hundred meters flight at 2 or 3 meters altitude)
www.ornithopter.net/

Re:hard to fly on mars..

[buswolley]

Mars has an atmosphere, albeit a thin one made mostly of carbondioxide. it may be but a whisper of a wind, but MArs has giant dust storms all the time.

.Got to get facts straightened out.

on a side note. Lets attack Mars.

mars mission?

[n3k5]

In the atmosphere of Mars, the are only 1.5% the molecules we have. The composition is also evry different, but the point is: it's _very_ thin. OTOH, the gravity on Mars is about 38% of Earth's gravity.

So if you have something that flies on Earth, it's still a long way to go until you get it to fly on Mars.

Re:mars mission?

[Xerithane]

Plus, just scaling the wings won't work. Any serious increase in the size of the wings will require you to increase the size of the motor, solenoid, dielectric fiber, or whatever is moving the wing.

In an unnamed project, we had the task of building a simulator (99.9% accurate, my what fun) for flight on mars. After building the system, when the plane reached 180 knots it would begin an oscillation pattern that would eventually drive it into the ground.

We got some aerospace engineers to take a look at the problem, and they started laughing and said that was normal because we were breaking the speed of sound at that altitude/speed.

Flying on mars is much different than flying on earth for a lot of things you wouldn't directly think about. But you are right, scaling wings wouldn't do anything right there. The best way to make a plane to fly on Mars is to look into glider dynamics.

smallest rc airplane

[ch-chuck]

that I know of is this guy, the L'il Skeeter.

Re:Swarms + GPS - flocking behaviour links

[LondonLawyer]

Sounds cool! Presumably the longer a swarm stays in one place, the better your resolution is likely to get....

Links to AI flocking behaviour resources which might be of interest....

Oxford Uni:
http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/~sumpter/

Craig Reynolds (early boid work):
http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/

Manchester Uni:
http://www.eng.man.ac.uk/Aero/wjc/Research/F lockin g/FlockingIndex.htm

US Airforce:
http://www.vs.afrl.af.mil/News/99-23.ht ml

In caves? Hardly.

[mtngrown]

RC in caves is a ludicrous concept, save for line of sight, but then, why bother. Cave radios work with really looooowwwwww frequencies and require rather large coil antennas to transmit through all that rock. Cave radios are pretty finicky too. This is why cave rescue organizations (good ones) have the ability to lay a mile or two of phone wire in really horrible conditions.

RC butterflies or RC anything-else just ain't gonna happen in a cave.

This is NOT a new idea...

[GLowder]

This is NOT a new idea. The Entomopter was developed, and discussed over a year ago.

Here's a link to it: http://www.cosmiverse.com/space12030102.html

It also explains how the thin atmosphere of Mars actually works to help their design of a flapping winged robot.