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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."
Danny Dunn to the white courtesy phone, please ...
There's a video of the DelFly Micro in action here. It takes flight about a minute and a half in.
You'd still notice this in the girl's shower.
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
I imagine that this thing is pretty difficult to fly. With it going that fast, the camera would be jumping around all over the place. How can this practically be used for observation flights? You'd have to analyze it frame-by-frame.
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.
I think a really good example is this guy's plane, he made it to be as light as possible and had to make his own motor for it. I think they should make one the size of this 'dragonfly' but with a propeller like the plane in the video.
take a peek at who's around thecorner.. or who's lieing prone on the ceiling... heck, add 2 grams of explosive and use it as a diversion.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
Insectothopter? CIA had these back in the 70s...very hard to control in winds over 5 knots though.
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...
In an issue of Meat & Poultry magazine, editors quoted from "Feathers," the publication of the California Poultry Industry Federation, telling the following story:
The US Federal Aviation Administration has a unique device for testing the strength of windshields on airplanes. The device is a gun that launches a dead chicken at a plane's windshield at approximately the speed the plane flies.
The theory is that if the windshield doesn't crack from the carcass impact, it'll survive a real collision with a bird during flight.
It seems the British were very interested in this and wanted to test a windshield on a brand new, speedy locomotive they're developing.
They borrowed FAA's chicken launcher, loaded the chicken and fired.
The ballistic chicken shattered the windshield, broke the engineer's chair and embedded itself in the back wall of the engine's cab. The British were stunned and asked the FAA to recheck the test to see if everything was done correctly.
The FAA reviewed the test thoroughly and had one recommendation:
"Use a thawed chicken."
I hate printers.
"Roland" is the submission whore that "blogs" (copies) stuff from all over, links to it, adds a simplistic comment then somehow gets that submitted to Slashdot.
He does it for ad revenue. Quite effective at it, and quite annoying for those great unwashed that don't suck Slashdot dick to get stories submitted.
Hm...I don't think they'll survive easily if they get sucked into a jet engine. They're kind of small and don't look that durable.
I would say 500 meters straight up and over the edge of that cliff you're standing at the bottom of would definitely fall under 'difficult-to-reach'. And quite possibly be extremely useful to have one person there checking that out before you bring in say that helicopter...
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Nooo it won't have Sidewinders, it will have a Stinger.
See cuz it's small.
Small right? Like a...
Bug...
Annnnnd...
<spontaneously implodes>
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
After looking at it in action, I still prefer the toy helis I got.
;) ).
They're 50% longer and wider (so not much bigger), but they are 5 times heavier - 15g.
They look like this:
http://www.airsport.com.hk/ShowProduct.asp?id=380
(I didn't buy it from there though - it's just a link I got from google).
Trouble is the quality control is not very good, so either you get it at a shop where you can test it first, or you'd have to risk getting a dud. And even if it seems to work, there's no guarantee it'll continue to work for more than a few days.
I've got three, and one is faulty (it still flies but the motor or something is not smooth- blades stop spinning nearly immediately when you cut the throttle). And some of my friends had helis that stopped working after a few days (that said, I don't know how well they treated their helis
The ones that work are pretty good fun. 3-channel = up/down, turn left/right, forwards and backwards.
Of course, they're not going to fool someone into thinking they're some insect. But the delfly micro doesn't fly like a dragonfly either. The only insects I can think of that fly like that are some moths (the larger ones).
BTW the summary appears to be wrong - the delfly does not seem to be autonomous at all - it is controlled by some human.
When I think of it, it's quite amazing how behind we are in tech- dragonflies are smaller, fly faster (50kph), fly for longer, are more manueverable, and are genuinely autonomous - they find their own "fuel" and even reproduce.
copied from snopes
Wasn't intended as a troll, I promise. :-) I was already aware that jets are tested with chickens, but chickens (bones included) are pretty soft compared to, say, batteries. And I think these could get pretty close to a jet on take-off or landing. Maybe you should re-read my comment and yours, and ask yourself which sounds more like a troll.
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
Radio control micro planes have been built here in the US by hobby people that weigh LESS than 1/2 gram
Actually, the first tests they did were inconclusive. They revisited it and eventually did find that frozen chickens had more penetrating power than thawed ones. The final test that was conclusive was several sheets of glass, and the frozen chicken broke more panes than the thawed one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_episodes:_Season_2#Episode_14_.E2.80.94_.22Myths_Revisited.22
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
no, i actually sound more like a psychopath...
But still a rc model of 3g... even with battery... would hardly damage an engine.
Mythbusters used the wrong kind of airframe for testing. It does make a big difference. The flimsy little unpressurized airplane they used was going to break no matter what they fired at it. They did a re-do of that test and concluded frozen was worse.
Part-23 aircraft (little airplanes) have to withstand a 2-lb bird hitting the windscreen at max flap speed. Part-25 aircraft (airliners) have to withstand an 8-lb bird hitting the empennage at cruse speed and a 4-lb bird hitting anywhere else including the wind screen at cruise speed. There is a whole aviation sub-industry devoted to testing and designing for bird impact.
In real life using a frozen chicken is a mistake nobody would ever make. I say this because in the bird impact business it is well known that bird density, a more subtle effect than frozen/thawed, is important. Chickens are more dense than flying birds and create higher peak impact transients. Chicken guns don't fire chickens any more, they fire freshly killed ducks or geese.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
This old chestnut has been around for years. The way I first heard it (at least 15 years ago) was that the Chicken Gun was Canadian and the FAA had to have the concept of a thawed fowl gently explained to them.
I have no doubt every country has a different idiot/victim, depending on who your most popular "moron nation" happens to be at the moment.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
There's also this new one, which is basically the same size as the DelFly Micro, can hover, and has double the flight time. It doesn't have a camera, though, but considering TFA claims the Micro's camera only weighs 0.5 grams it would be easy to add one.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I've got three, and one is faulty (it still flies but the motor or something is not smooth- blades stop spinning nearly immediately when you cut the throttle).
That sure sounds like hair either wrapped around the rotor spindle or pressing between the spindle and the motor to me. Even one hair can slow down the blades and make the thing unflyable. I use a big magnifying glass and an X-Acto knife blade to clear any foreign matter out of this area.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.