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Da Vinci's Ornithopter Prepares For a Test Flight
Dirak writes "Over 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci conceptualized a self-powered flying machine that would achieve both lift and thrust with flapping wings alone and named it the "ornithopter". Hot on the heels of the 100th Anniversary of the Wright Brothers flight, and the recent X prize, a team of scientists from University of Toronto's Institute for Aerospace have taken on this challenge to make Leonardo's dream a reality."
I remember reading the Dune series a while back and I had to pull out a dictionary to look up what an ornithopter was. Wouldn't current technoloy be a lot more efficient?
Wow, I'm actually rather shocked nobody's tried this before. It's a famous bit of trivia that da Vinci "invented" the helicopter, it was only a matter of time (~500 yrs) before somebody set his theories into practice.
this was my first encounter with an Orithopter. ;-)
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they've final got around to starting
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Currently, only pilots made of balsa wood can fly this thing.
We have one of these toy ornithopters and it flies quite nicely. Its use of a leading-edge rigid spar and loose mylar wing material make the wing form a semi-efficient shape on both the up and down stroke.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It's a bird! It's a plane! No! It's an Or-ni-thop-ter!
Doesn't make for much good comedy. They should get Paul McCarthney as a test pilot and call it "Wings". Ha. Sorry.
I don't think it will work. I think that the human power to weight ratio is too small to move enough air at sea level to lift a body. Regardless of any magical gearing or lever action..
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Why bother even casting it? Sure, it's 0 Mana, but it's still a 0/2 Flying Artifact. Give me a break. What are you gonna do? Enchant it? Oooh, don't hurt me.
Oh wait, you mean in real life. Ahhhh.... *whistling*
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Pardon my engineering ignorance, but is this any more efficient than the current style of pulling a fixed-wing craft through the air with a separate engine? My gut instinct says no, but I've been suprised before. Thoughts?
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Back in September, they tried to make it work but it didn't get very far at all...
prepares for test flight??
Come on, every aircraft invented has hat at least a propulsion test and even models tested WAY before they do a real test.
so this thing works well then? how did the first tests go? how about video fo the RC prototypes they used to test to see if the thing was workable or a clever way of spending money foolishly?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The proper name to use is "Leonardo", or "Leonardo Da Vinci", not "Da Vinci". That's like referring to someone as "of Dallas".
...is what it will become after the porn sites get it. Won't be long before they combine this with a drill-dildo and wireless webcam for some hot action over Manhattan.
ardustry
ardustry
I wonder what kind of restrictions would be put on such a device. I know that you only need a driver's license in the US if your vechicle is motorized and on a public street. A device like this would be powered like a bike and in the air. More importanly though, would the little spawns of satan that live next door to me be able to fly one into my house?
Now we'll finally have a vehicle suitable for tracking spice miners on Arrakis.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Yes, "modern" technology is more efficient, but this does a great deal to teach us about structural engineering in highly unconventional designs. I doubt Ornithopters will ever be popular (except maybe as a sideshow at larger fairs and airshows) but as a case study for engineers... It would be superb!
Engineers at schools, colleges and even some Universities tend to build "nice, safe" projects. Stuff that teaches you how to bolt things together - if you're lucky. A good project should be hard enough that engineers are going to fail at least once, because you learn far more by failing - and more again by catching problems before they turn into failure.
It is obvious now that Ornithopers are hard engineering problems. As such, even if they have no other value, they would make superb educational devices.
Inventions like this are never wasted - only opportunities can be wasted.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I remember seeing something on TV regarding old designs by such people as DV. The Scientists made a few design modifications and hey presto it failed... However when they went back to the original designs they found the the devices worked as intended by the designer. I also recall reading something of one such designer where; not wanting the devices to be used for "evil"; built a very simple but obvious design flaw in to each one. Sorry about being so vaugue
I can remember reading somewhere (probably in the "Da Vinci Code"-book) that he used to write down errors in his sketches on purpose. Is this what's causing problems when trying to realise his plans?
"I don't think it will work. I think that the human power to weight ratio is too small to move enough air at sea level to lift a body. Regardless of any magical gearing or lever action.."
Fixed wing human powered aircraft
have been flown successfully.
So, the power to weight ratio is there for fixed wing. The problem with the ornithopter is the huge amount of energy required to reach a speed where the wings are efficient enough for human power. This might be done with some sort of pre-takeoff storage, say with one of those ultra-highspeed flywheels in a vacuum that were in popular press as automobile energy storage units a few years back.
It flies like a bird, once it's flying. The operational geometry of the
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
Leonardo did not invent this concept. Childern of the day had toy heleecopter like devices. He did, however, have many additional innovations that were remarkable. It is sad how his innovations in so many feilds are over shadowed by his atributed inventions.
I remember seeing a program talking about how insect flight is much more efficient than traditional methods... Something about the downstroke of the wing creating a vacume that pulls it back up.
Might have been another ether induced hallucination though... Ah Poppin Fresh...
A television programme (I think it was entitled The DaVinci Challenge) aired on the Australian Special Broadcasting Service earlier this year, in which two teams built and tested DaVinci's ornothopter (and some other machines of his) using materials only available in Ol' Leo's time.
Those things are used in the movie DUNE, and also in the video game. I loved DUNE I, one of the first games with 256 colors.
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The expediency of the ornithopter model as it approaches efficiency will outperform fixed wing aircraft
Ideas borrowed from nature almost always bring about an improvement in performance. This article discusses how we can incorporate design ideas from nature and some ideas already borrowed , and thus portrays their superiority in general
Can't say I worked out the details, but I suspect they're gonna need it.
Wil Smith and his sidekick Kevin Kline already created it to defeat Dr. Arlyss Loveless's mechanical spider in Wild, Wild West. So you nerds are just making something already invented.
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The write up suggests it is, and lots of comments have concluded this, but it looks like they're actually trying to make something that will work with modern lightweight materials and construction techniques.
"Flapping flight as a practical means of personal flight may well be developed into an extreme sport that may one day see itself even lauded at a future Olympic Games."
It's that author again.... Kim Stanley Robinson mentions this in Blue Mars, where some of the Martian kids use specially-designed suits that amplify the wearer's flapping muscle movements into actual movement capable of providing lift. Of course, being on Mars makes it a bit easier to do this sort of thing. But it's good to know a team somewhere are going to get this going. Wonder if they need a test subject/pilot....?
That's like referring to someone as "of Dallas".
or of Redmond.
or Crawford.
Tweet, tweet.
Wait till the Royal Canadian Air Force gets hold of this. It'll catapult them from the middle ages into the 15'th century.
Hmm... even if flapping wings are more effective than fixed wings, they can't scale too well or there would be more large flying things about, no?
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I have just seen a BBC documentary series about Leonardo where they tested Leonardo's designs for a robot, a parachute, a tank, a scubasuit and a glider. It was pretty cool and there was indeed in each drawing of the machines some kind of an (intentional) error which prevented them from working in the beginning. More about the BBC series: http://www.open2.net/leonardo/index.htm
There was a patent issued just in October for another ornithopter. This one was invented by a guy in Florida. Probably a retiree with a dream.
8 02 473
http://www.patentlysilly.com/patent.php?patID=6
The problem as I see it is of mass versus power. It seems that as the size of the organizm is increased linearly the power required for propulsion is increased as a sqare or a cube of size increase. That is why a lot of mosquitos (or any small insects) fly and not too many elephants (large animals) do. If someone would simply resize a mosquito 100x its legs would break and won't even be able to hold its body weight let alone fly. That is why elephants have much thicker legs in proportion to their body as opposed to flies or mosquitos. Or even ostrages don't fly even though they have wings. The point is that humans seem to be just too big and heavy for flight. Our muscles are not strong enough support ourselves in flight. It's nice to dream though...
Don't stay on the ground too long or a worm will get you!
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According to the Dune Encyclopedia, the ornithopter of Dune was powered by a Heart Scallop, a living, breathing, organism that was attached to the wings by a complicated mechanism consisting of ball-and-socket joints. Plus, the ornithopter had jet-pod assists and a fixed-wing flight mode. The jet pods probably used some kind of circular motion for propulsion. Therefore, the ornithopter of Dune was a hybrid machine.
Also when they interviewed the professor, he was saying that a thopter could potentionally be much more manuverable then a traditional air plane, which was one of the reasons why he was building it.
-Derek
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
If God intended creatures to fly, He would have given them flappy thingies to.. oh.. nevermind
Therefore, the ornithopter of Dune was a hybrid machine.
As is the motor assisted bicycle.
KFG
(From the previous post...) "The reason nature has adopted the flapping wing is simply because it cannot emulate a shaft unidirctionally rotating in a bearing in a biological structure, so it had to make do."
Au contraire. Mother Nature is one hell of an engineer. I remember reading about the design of bacterial rotary flagellae in Scientific American a few years back, and marvelling at the elegance of the motor.
Here's an article from Wikipedia that describes it pretty well (excerpted below).
The filament is composed of the protein flagellin and is a hollow tube 20 nanometers thick. It is helical, and has a sharp bend just outside the outer membrane called the "hook" which allows the helix to point directly away from the cell. A shaft runs between the hook and the basal body, passing through protein rings in the cell's membranes that act as bearings.
The bacterijjkklellum is driven by a rotary engine composed of protein, located at the flagellum's anchor point on the inner cell membrane. The engine is powered by proton motive force, i.e., by the flow of protons across the bacterial cell membrane due to a concentration gradient set up by the cell's metabolism (in Vibrio species the motor is a sodium ion pump, rather than a proton pump). The rotor transports protons across the membrane, and is turned in the process. The rotor by itself can operate at 6,000 to 17,000 rpm, but with a filament attached usually only reaches 200 to 1000 rpm.
If anybody remembers the movie Birdy, there was a scene early in the movie where the main character lets a elastic powered ornithopter go in a class room. What an awesome site to see that little guy fly.
;]
If you have not seen the movie, I highly recommend it and the soundtrack is based on one of Peter Gabriels better albums.
Regarding UofT project, I hope these guy's succeed. I'm pretty sure that materials have gotten strong and light enough to enable full size models but... very very expensive! I hope they bring a parachute
Indeed. I totally overlooked bacterial flagellum even though I myself brought up the issue of flagela in another post.
Bad poster. No Doritos.
KFG
The whole reason most people concentrate on normal flight is because it distils the problem down to the two basic problems and allows you to find the most efficient solution for both. You need lift and you need forward momentum. With lift, the simplest form is a fixed wing. With motion, an engine is readily at hand.
The problem with recreating bird flight is that it's an exercise in finesse. With flapping, lift and momentum are achieved simultaneously in ONE mechanical motion with very complex real-time correction to keep the desired effect. Technology is really bad at recreating these kind of infinitely variable mechanics. You can start to make the same kind of mechanical movement but the brain that controls the correction is still way off.
Wheels are efficient ONLY in the one special case of where you have a roadway or tracks. Walking beats wheels in terms of energy usage on any uneven surface, not just stairs. The reason is that with wheels the whole vehicle has to be lifted up and down over every bump. The lifts require work. Walking simply bi-passes the little bumps.
and there are bacterial organisms (spirochetes) that use their entire bodies for rotary motion.
Modern materials make it possible to build a strong enough frame and wings at a small fraction of what something like this would have weighed using materials from 500 years ago. The most important weight contribution to the total weight of an ornithopter would be the body weight of its driver.
The most common mistake in I have seen in many unsuccessful historical ornithopter attempts is trying to use the arms to power the device. Even the "governator" (in his younger days) did not have sufficient power and stamina in his chest and shoulder and upper back muscles to provide sufficient energy to lift his own body weight plus the weight of the machine. Humans have much stronger leg muscles with much better stamina, so a machine like this which needs to be human powered needs to use legs.
There has been several successful attempts at building human powered aircraft using fixed wings and some kind of a pedal-driven propellar system, so we know that the human body can actually generate and sustain sufficient energy for flight - at least over short distances. It will all come down to how efficiently energy created by a pedal-crank system can be converted to wing-motion for an ornithopter to fly.
I wonder how 'ornithopter' should be pronounced properly. Assuming it to mean 'birdwing', I would put the emphasis on the last syllabe, but then I am not a native english speaker...
Paai
"Straight-wing gliders are nearly trivial, once you know the shape of an aerofoil."
:-s.
m 0329759/AUAV/
Getting to model the aerofoil in itself is alone a huge problem. Lift and drag coefficients are mostly got from windtunnel tests, and I don't think you have one (a windtunnel that is) in your attic either
The sky's the limit (or was it my imagination)
http://www.student.kuleuven.ac.be/~
From the FA..."However, until now, most attempts to fly by flapping wings, either using human muscle or mechanical power have failed." OK, argue "most" with me if you want, but..... There are readily available R/C kits that do just this. I am not talking about those stupid "TIM" birds that you wind up and they flap around like they are having a seizure, I mean a real "R/C ORNITHOPTER". Here is a link to videos of one of the MANY models available. http://www.jgrc.biz/en-us/pg_25.html While the full-size project is definately cool, I think they are overstating it a bit. This design HAS been made mechanically possible well before now.
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
Hot on the heels of the 100th Anniversary of the Wright Brothers flight, and the recent X prize...
Combine this with the X-prize. If someone can make a Da Vinci machine reach 60 miles of altitude, they win. No way in hell am I gonna be the test pilot, though. Then again, perhaps exclude humans to make it more palettable. Send a Barbi up.
Table-ized A.I.
An Harkonnens, watch out for them too.
In case you haven't seen the flightgear flight simulator project, now's the time. In addition to being more accurate in a lot of aspects than any other PC-based flight simulation programs available to the general public, as well as being a popular research platform for aviation-related folks, it features a lot of exotic aircraft, including the model of the ornithopter. The ornithopter team folks, featured in TFA, collaborate with the flightgear project, and AFAIU the computer simulations mentioned in the TFA were in fact partly done with the help of the flighgear.
VKh
The main interest in ornithopters today is in Micro Air Vehicles- small (~6 inches) military reconnaissance robots. Incidentally, the aerodynamics of flapping flight at small sizes are very different from those of aircraft. Insects use lots of weird mechanisms, such as the ability to generate high lift with leading edge vortices.
That's actually an entomopter, because it is based on insects, as you mentioned, rather than on birds.
You can't take the sky from me...
I have a better idea. See I've made these wings out of wax. So far I've only had one problem with them . . . . :)
This man was one of my absolute best Profs during my time at U of T. Hard-core aerodynamics to start, with 15 mins of ancient (P)russian history to finish off each lecture. I found I took in and can (still) recall WAY more of the 'meat' because of the 'potatoes' he threw in.
I have to say, making an ornithopter is quite a tough problem, from talking w/ him and the students on the project. Much like helicopters, the way forward will be a significant materials problem, with just as much aeroelasticity.
Am I the only one who saw "ornithopter" in the headline and thought "Dune"? That's certainly the only place I've ever seen the word before.
g
Best artist's conception I could find on short notice:
http://www.duneinfo.com/michael/images/landing.jp
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i don't know how i feel about a vehicle that doesn't consume obscene amounts of fossil fuels...
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I think the main problem is that this craft has no feathers. On a bird's wing, the feathers act like a one way valve, letting air through the wing on the upstroke, and blocking it on the downstroke. Without some sort of mechanism for letting the air through, the wing will push the craft down on the upstroke by as much as it pushes it up on the downstroke.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
You're thinking of a different ninja.
Big flying things could find it difficult to swoop through a forest, true, but what about grassland? Big open spaces support large predators, some of which have large territories which they patrol. Surely there is an advantage in being able to cover a large area and having a better vantage point? Why haven't falcons scaled up to eat bigger prey?
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Reading descriptions of it's bobbing up and down behavior, I wonder if it wouldn't be better to give the ornithoptor four wings rather than two. As one pair move up, the other pair moves down, thus negating the wasted energy of lifting the machine vertically and instead putting it all into forward thrust.
"The reason nature has adopted the flapping wing is simply because it cannot emulate a shaft unidirctionally rotating in a bearing in a biological structure, so it had to "make do."
This isn't strictly true. Many protozoans (and our sperm cells too) have flagella that provide propulsion by rotation. The little ATP burning motor is an amazing machine.
Never took off in larger animals for some reason. Be an interesting endeavor to find out why that is, eh?
German for "flying day", during the Flugtag event, people build all sorts of human powered flying machines and parade them out, usually for the amusement of watching them try to fly, but inevitably ending up "in the drink" - as they launch their crafts over a large body of water.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
nature HAs made a "CRT." Those octopi can project all sorts of shapes of color across their bodies. It allows them to hide in the wide open...
Incase you missed the Daily Planet Show; keep a lookout for the Dec 10th episode at the Discovery Channel Canada - they do have video on their site; http://www.exn.ca/dailyplanet/archivelist.asp