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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."
If you could put cameras on these things they would be great for espionage. I imagine the military would love to see some tiny radio controlled flying vehicles with video capture capability.
you can take the road that takes you to the stars...
...if the MSN marketroids ever got their hands on this technology...arrgh the butterflies...they're everywhere...
Ceci n'est pas une
and possibly, terrorism. and possibly Big Brother's lil Helpers, and possibly a pest to native birds who try to eat them.
What a world we live in!
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
We are planning to send a fleet of mechanical butterflies to mars...
Good morning slashdot!
Although the west assures the world that butterfly aircraft will be used for exploritory purposes, iraq believes that the butterflies will be used for offensive purposes...
They have responded by ordering several large nets.
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.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
> The butterfly has had hundreds of
> millions of years to develop it's
> flight model.
So what? The lotus flower had at least as much time to develop its self-cleaning petals, but it took human scientists just a few years to develop an agent that gives any glass surface the same property just by spraying it on. It forms the same nano structures that make water drops, which take every trace of dust and dirt with them, flow off completely, or even drops of super glue.
> It's about the finely tuned control
> mechanisim (in this case, butterfly brain)
Oh look, behold the mighty powers of the butterfly brain, which is about as intelligent as my cheapo Casio watch. I don't see much problems with emulating this. By the way, most of the 'knowledge' about flying isn't in that tiny butterfly brain anyway, it's hardwired into the nervous system. The wings flap so fast that the delay of sending impulses all the way to the brain and back all the time would be too big.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
Scale is important. Turbulence happens more readily at large scales. Viscous drag is more significant at smaller scales. Gravity is more significant at larger scales. A very small insect is effectively rowing through the air, using most if its effort to propel itself along. An aircraft spends most of its effort creating lift - and drag, because the two always go together - to keep itself up. So, we're not going to have 747's with butterfly-shaped wings flitting from building to building. Which is a shame....
When things develop through evolution it tends to be by a series of small changes, each representing no improvement or a small improvement. This means that although evolution over a long time tends towards a working solution, it doesn't always tend to the best (most efficient) solution. The structure of your eye is a case in point - the blood supply lies in front of the light sensitive cells of the retina.
What may be useful is that the process can find non-intuitive solutions to problems and there is a built in robustness to what emerges. Random variation has to have a wider tightrope to walk or any deviation from the norm would be fatal. Complex evolved systems also tend to have a built in redundancy as they grow out of similar and simpler systems which become interrelated.
Slashdotters may remember a report a year or so old about an evolving robot which developed dragonfly-like flight. Why take a pattern found in nature (photographic the butterfly) and try to work out how it works when you can evolve it directly with a learning system? If you're going to ape evolved systems it seems much more sensible (and easier) to me to ape the process rather than the result.
We can produce land vehicles than can travel across continents without refuelling. No animal can do this.
We can produce aeroplanes that will fly around the world without refuelling. No bird can do this.
I see no fundamental reason why we can't produce a mechanical butterfly that can operate for days without refuelling as real butterflies can achieve this. If you are really small then the energy required to keep you aloft is really small also. I've absolutely no idea how much energy a butterfly requires to keep it in the air for a day but my guess would be that it is considerably less than that contained in one drop of petrol.
wot no sig