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Ultra-Light Micro Air Vehicles
Roland Piquepaille writes "Dutch engineers have built the third generation of the DelFly autonomous air vehicle. The DelFly Micro made its first public flight earlier today in Delft. This micro air vehicle weighs only 3 grams and has a wingspan of 10 centimeters. This very small remote-controlled aircraft carries a 0.4 gram camera. The DelFly Micro, which looks like a dragonfly, can fly for 3 minutes at a maximum speed of 5 meters/second. It could be used for observation flights in difficult-to-reach or dangerous areas."
3 minutes is not very useful. By the time you reach your destination and actually get some good images, you've run out of time to return and have effectively lost your MAV. If they are meant to be throw-away, this is not a design flaw.
From my experience as an RC pilot, the smaller the craft, the more difficult it is to control. I would be curious to see how they've overcome the twitchiness of a such light weight.
Bearded Dragon
Does NO ONE ELSE remember THIS conversation:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/11/131214
Scroll through it and take in all the posts about how all the eye witnesses were CRAZY to have reported seeing "Dragonfly-Sized Insect Spies". Bathe in the impossibility of the batteries, the cameras, the wireless technology. Soak up how it simply was not even close to being true.
One of a short list of things must be the case:
A) That story from October certainly WAS plausible and a lot of you pundits are going to be dining on fresh hat today.
B) All the know-it-all's are still correct, due to some technicality.
C) I have somehow swapped dimensions again and no one ever said it didn't happen at all...
The DelFly Micro, which looks like a dragonfly, can fly for 3 minutes at a maximum speed of 5 meters/second. It could be used for observation flights in difficult-to-reach or dangerous areas
How can it do that, if it only flies for 3 minutes?
I don't understand why they're trying to shape it after a dragonfly- There are more efficient ways of getting around the air than flapping wings. I mean, yeah, I get that it would be cool to have one that actually looked like a dragonfly for spying and such, but for getting into dangerous or hard to reach places it shouldn't be designed this way.
Yeah, the millions of species of insect and bird have got a lot to learn from us land lubbers. I mean, hovering in one position is a piece of cake for our mechanical devices, so much so that we can get a flight to anywhere we want and we don't need a runway. Oh, wait, we can't unless we use a helicopter, which is slow in the horizontal plane and noisy and fuel hungry.
Living things manipulate the air in much more elegant and finely controlled ways than anything man has produced. We mainly just force our way through it.
you really are new here
no, i actually sound more like a psychopath...
But still a rc model of 3g... even with battery... would hardly damage an engine.
I don't understand why they're trying to shape it after a dragonfly- There are more efficient ways of getting around the air than flapping wings.
Flapping wings can be more efficient at low Reynolds number configurations, like small insects or micro UAVs.
Evolution, of course, already worked out the Reynolds number configurations for soaring, near-fixed wing flight (large birds of prey) versus mostly flapping flight (flies).