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Human Powered Helicopter
marcopo writes "In response to a 24 year old prize challenge from the American Helicopter Society, a number of engineering students at the University of British Columbia have designed a human powered helicopter. The prize requirements are 3 minutes flight at 3 meters, with only human power, and the team, led by UBC's Mike Georgallis, plans a test flight next Tuesday.
The Vancouver Sun also has the
story."
Yaba-Daba-Dooooo!!!!! ~~~~~*Sppppppplat*
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
If it's $1000, and you don't need a helicopter pilot's license, I'll buy one. If it works, that is.
Those wings have a huge volume, you should be able to get pretty good lift if you filled them with helium. Of course I don't know what the rules would say.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Can they use a battery? As in charge the battery using human power and then run the motor off the battery power???
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
12.) WILL IT FLY? The machine is heavier than originally designed... The unknown at the moment is whether the machine will break up prior to lift off. Whether or not any system will break up becomes all the more relevant when it involves humans and rotating blades.
Instruction manual:
1. Place helmet on head. Take a swig from your hip flask. Decide you don't need the helmet.
2. Spread arms parallel to ground.
3. Hum 'whirrrr' as you spin yourself to speed.
4. Upon striking your head on the floor on the way down, remark how free you feel in the open air.
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First the machines use us to power helecopers! Soon they will have us power all their functions after we scortch the sun! Who is with me? We must stop this to save Zion!
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That's the only real question. They should be more careful wording the requirement.
3 comments and it's already slashdotted to oblivion
3 Meters is a pretty high distance to fall from, even without being surrounded by fast moving metal, cogs, and chains. Considering that they'll want to optimize the weight of the machine, there will almost certainly be no safety cage or equipment.
I sure as hell wouldn't want to pilot it.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
Zero comments on this story and the link is already /.'d; the kid running the server must be tired. Somebody get him a coffee and some smokes.
You already have the world's best human helicopter in Inspector Gadget.
Oh man, their project is named Thunderbird. Quick, Mozilla Foundation! Send our your legions of lawyers! We must stop this blatant misuse of your trademarks!!
[insert witty comment here]
afaik it's quite hard to build a human powered plane (yes, someone made it from France to England many years ago). A helicopter is much trickier, because the pilot must run two rotors at the same time. It's not easy to transfer human energy to two places without adding much weight. I'm not an expert in helicopters, but it's kinda obvious to me that the pilot would have to use extraordinary effort to stay above the ground for 3 minutes.
I don't read replies by ACs.
Could something like this eventually be as common as the bicycle? I, for one, think it would be pretty cool to fly to work everyday.
Reminds me of watching the Jetsons as a kid LOL
Mod points are pointless when you browse at -1.
"Jane, get me off this crazy thing! JAAAAANE!!!" ~~~~~~~~ *Spppppplat*
The room will be falling for four minutes.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to just burn humans for fuel?
I don't read replies by ACs.
well aren't you just a whiny little piece of shite.
What a boneheaded idea to point the article link to the splash page showing a cute jpg logo.
We don't want to steal the bandwidth. We want to read the article AND steal the bandwidth. No, nevermind, I don't think they want to read the article either.
Nice font on the picture.
Click here for a free picture of an iPod!
Especially since that graphic would have looked perfect and taken up much less space as a GIF or PNG.
i wonder why they went with the recombent position rather than a upright postion. i would imagine you get a little extra power upright. you're not worried about airdynamics when hovering also.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Yeah, I get a whole 28.8 (somtimes just 26.4).
Seriously though, most don't have broadband. So do you do a website for the small percentage who do, or for everyone?
Mycroft
(and no, I can't get a better connection without HUGE expense)
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Everyone knows Alex Kidd invented the pedicopter in 1983.
In case anyone here doesnt know about generating watts, 500 sustained for over 3 minutes is quite a task. I have been rowing for 7 years and this year our team had physiological testing where we started at 200 watts and increased by 50 every 2 minutes. I last about 8 minutes and managed to hit about 400 watts but couldnt hold it long enough to be allowed to continue to 450. We increased in this manner in order to find our VO2 maxes, and certainly had I started at 500 watts I could have held it for a while, maybe a minute and a half. But 3 minutes is just sick. Especially since this was on the rowing machine which uses all muscles and this guy is only uses his legs, no back and arms. This 3 minute test will generate enough lactic acid to kill the average 60 year old man, and will certainly leave him in excruciating pain if he is able to do it at all.
The physical part of this is probably just as challenging as the engineering aspect.
I'm thinking we can round up a whole bunch right in Washington DC.
Anyway, all that "human powered" pedaling sounds like work to me.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Don't worry people, they didn't crach, it's only their server..
BAH, we have one of these teams at my school too (University of Michigan).
Although i will admit i didn't RTFA, it's not news unless it actually FLIES. This has been tried and failed many many times already.
That old Disney Movie called "The Monkey's Uncle" about a college wiz kid named Merlin Jones who has to build a human powered flying machine to save his college's football program. After many problems he gets it to work by using another one of his inventions (liquid strength) to boost his stamina to keep the machine going for the specified amount of time.
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
SHUT IT YOU CUNT
The submitter should have posted this URL instead:
http://batman.mech.ubc.ca/~hph/index2.html
That bypasses the huge intro graphic and reduces the load on the server.
Some poor sap's legs are going to be sore as hell the next day.
Just put the human(s), bald and naked, into liquid-filled pods and wire 'em up for electrical power! Then build some hovering tentacled robots to do maintenance. Then... ...Or you could do it the boring way -- you know, pedals and the like...
I proposed to build this very thing.
Of course, I was only 10 at the time, and had no clue about mechanical engineering. Still, it's good to see someone else wanted to, and now someone will.
Everyone in BC flies just smoking POT the first export product from BC.
Aside from that, let me attack your points.
I consider 10 feet or 3 meters to be high enough to cause significant injury to a simple terran.
The gears and chains are made out of metal if you look at the pictures. Have you ever heard of such things being made of composites? That would be quite bizarre.
Ground effect is the only decent bit of info you mention. For those who aren't aware, ground effect is the phenomenon by which a helicopter rests on a cushion of air bounded by the ground and the rotor disc. The area in which it is useful exists roughly at an altitude equal to the diameter of the rotor disc. It's essential for all low-powered flight, especially an emergency autorotation landing in something over than an autogyro.
"Helicopter flying books?" I assume you mean rotary-wing aerodynamics books. I've read some; they're quite good.
...for a motorised version.
;)
Whilst there's something undeniably cool about what basically amounts to an airborne bicycle, I'd settle for an airborne moped. Using a small (~1-2 bhp) moped engine would make for only a minor weight increase, and it would surely make for less sweat
I'm a certificated pilot (fixed-wing) who's flown helicopters (a Robinson R22 Beta) once, and that was so incredibly fun that I'd hop in an ultralight homebuilt chopper in a second. Just let me know where to buy the kit.
p
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God I hate you 791k's.
Yep, and I'm about to become a part of it...
(told u i was hardcore)
That's very interesting. You've contributed valuably to this discussion.
Most Canadians with internet access have broadband. What backwater country are you from?
Oh yeah? I proposed to build a time machine, and in 40 years, somebody else will.
No this is Sloshdat - I suggest Darl...
Oh well, what the hell...
maybe they need to have a contest where college kids build a webserver that can stand up to a slashdot link for more than 5 minutes...
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
The first country to even HAVE phone service. Thus most of the infrastructure is OLD tech indeed. And since most of the data goes over the patchwork systems that started out as a phone system we have major early adopter problems. We're also pretty spread out.
Also most of Canada's population is somewhat better distributed for the purposes of broadband.
Add in the fact that MOST people do NOT have broad band, designing a site just for those that do is not a good idea unless your site caters to broadband users.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
This Human Powered Helicopter project is undoubtedly very interesting. What I would really like to see, though, is a Helicopter Powered Human. I've heard some rumors that scientists in Soviet Russia might be already working on it as we speak.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
With bigger blades for lift acting more like a plane.
I doubt they would accept it but it blurs the line.
I just flew in from Vancouver, and boy are my legs tired!
if they launch from Wreck Beach they should be able to safe a couple of (possibly critical) ounces of takeof weight.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
where does everyone come up with this 3 minute hover stuff?
if you had read the rules of the contest, or the story from the paper (which i read IN the paper), you dorks would have seen its a 1 minute hover requirement, not 3.
why bother even putting links to the info if no one is going to read it?
oh, i forgot, i am new here, and this is slashdot. idiots.
It's all ball bearings nowadays.
man i bet these guys would whup butt at the redbull flugtag.... if it works that is
...the end result would like a cross between a beer bong and Volkswagen Bug with rotors.
While a human powered helicopter is impressive, I have a feeling the UBC engineers won't feel accomplished until they hang the thing underneath some bridge.
Why are we so homocentric? Aren't monkeys lighter than us and much stronger? I think watching a monkey try to fly a helicopter would be really funny too.
Maybe the 1 minute hover constraint is a little on the wishful side - but I just want to see the look on the monkey's face as it 'accidentally' veers into a helpless crowd of onlookers in bermuda shorts.
Stuff that matters.
Uh, maybe they were more worried about making their helicopter work. Assclown.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
... Ford Thunderbird. Would end up being mass chaos of who coined the term first. Rediculous.
Sig: I stole this sig.
so i guess no one else thought a transmission might get used huh?
http://www.rustyrazorblade.com
IAAA (I am an aerodynamicist)...
Helicopters do have one advantage, power-wise, over fixed-wing. The limiting factor with fixed-wing craft is the strength of the wings in bending. If the wings could be made much longer, then less power would be required, but they cannot be made longer without becoming much more massive to support the increased bending load.
In a helicopter, centripetal acceleration helps keep the blades straight, so less bending strength would be necessary; tensile strength, which is a lot easier (and lighter) to build in, should suffice.
Not clear in practice how much that would help, but there is at least one advantage, anyway!
Considering it's only 10 minutes away from my house, me a friend will be going to see it. Hopefully we'll get some good pics to follow up with.
this thing won't be hung from a bridge haha, its too valuable and took too long to built..it'll proly be placed in some museum hopefully~
Both the pilot and the contest are 24. I suspect UBC's genetic engineering program started on the engineer when the contest was first announced....It has nothing to do with the chopper design and everything to do with the pilot. ;-)
-- SYS 64738 --
... of the given speeds of rotation. 3 and 6 rpm? So the blades really turn once every 20 or 10 seconds?
It's amazing that they get such a big team together (there is a list of the members on the website) and all are working motivated towards this goal... sadly, this is very rare.
I only know very few people who have an interested in building things, educated tinkering etc. And as a physics student, I have many contacts to people who should(*) be interested in such things.
(*) - IMHO, at least some of them should...
University based team attempts suborbitable spaceflight with only human power.
Here's a link to a SAMPE journal paper describing the project in details.
They'll have to change the name before they can fly.
This means that the initial takeoff shouldn't be as difficult as expected if the pitch of the blades is controllable. The pilot can get the rotors spinning more freely, pull on the 'collective' (blade angle control) and the momentum of the rotors will help pop it into the air. The problem I see is that the energy required to spin up the rotors doesn't count towards the timed flight, so once you're in the air you're already at a disadvantage.
This will never work. Some PC, animal-loving, left-wing jerk will throw a wrench in the works.
SharkJumper
At 3m, won't they still be in "ground effect"?
I am not hundred percent sure that this qualifies as useful.
What they could do is allow the human to pedal to power a generator and put the equivalent mass on board of the helicopter, put an electrical motor on the helicopter and save the pilot in case of an accident.
You can't handle the truth.
you knew it would come to this, right?
What are they doing? Some *stunt flying* or something?!
Then they just gave me that look.
Yeah...the look.
Why is it that I can't select anything other than "Agree" for that quiz?
(Of course, the questions are worded in such a way that it's difficult to disagree with them, but that's a separate issue.)
--RJ
yes, this is a cool project. its wonderful what can happen when kids get the free time to really create, and stand on the shoulders of generations before them. hats off to the thunderbird team, and those who follow in their footsteps ...
but what happens when the plans for this human-powered flight system make their way to the teething masses of starving humanity, who are able, using their ultra-limited resources, to build their own free wings outta nowhere?
if you can pedal yourself over the ocean, the whole 'nation' game is over. the technologists won.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Great, now the Mozilla mail reader's going to need yet another new name...
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