Slashdot Mirror
Flying Robot Bird Unveiled
mikejuk writes "Festo, well known for their biologically inspired robots, have a new creation called SmartBird. It is amazing to watch and all the more amazing when you realize that it flaps its wings and all of the control is via a torsion drive which twists the wings during each flap. The whole thing depends on the constant intervention of the software to keep it under control."
...targeted bird droppings.
Isn't that the same thing?
The whole thing depends on the constant intervention of the software to keep it under control
That seems to be a fairly well understood problem. Hasn't pretty much every fighter aircraft from the 1970's F16 onward required such software intervention? Inherent flight instability being leveraged for greater performance?
No, it's just a kinetic poop intervention.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Obviously the bird in the video isn't to the point of being to perform in the same way as our Harriers, but we are definitely seeing the future of military aircrafts. Our fighter jets out perform nature in many ways, but one only has to go outside for a few minutes to see bird after bird perform in ways that makes every current aircraft pale in comparison. This is a demonstration that gets the ball rolling.
F-15 Screamin' Eagle, pahh, meet the F-420 Literally Screamin' Eagle.
I've been disappointed in all the "Dune" movies that they haven't managed to properly portray the Ornithopters (as in the books).
Of course, I also hate that the MI in "Starship Troopers" didn't get the powered armor!
To get back on topic, this robo-bird is pretty amazing. There have been a bunch of mini-drones that can be used to spy on an enemy, but they all *look* like drones. These would not raise an eyebrow...
-- Don't call me "Sir," I increase entropy for a living!
Well beyond humanoids.
It's so beautiful, interesting, and yet creepy in a way.
Humanity's advances in certain areas (like robotics) are amazing. The sad part is that we are way ahead in certain areas, but way behind in other three key areas:
a) Energy:
We still have to crack the energy issue. We lack both reliable ways to gather energy, and reliable ways to store it.
b) AI
We are still in diapers in weak AI, and not even started in strong AI.
c) Economy
We are still based on the stupid principle of scarcity. Until we realize that we can produce as much as we need of just about anything, and that we are limiting ourselves by creating artificial scarcity to keep alive a system that's been dead for a long time, we won't make that breakthrough into what we thought the year 2000 was going to be.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
This is quite simply amazing. And even though it's not perfect, can you imagine the implications of this? Everything from weaponization to ornithology. Imagine being able to observe a flock of birds on a migratory route as part of the flock! It's really quite stunning.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
but who will use it first?
It's like the mind going AWOL, it's there somewhere
it fills me with joy. I wonder if other birds will attack it.
It came with my car as a standard feature. Along with automatic jacks, belt tires, cutter blades, deflectors.
Fight Spammers!
"see those birds? at some point, a program was written to govern those." - The Oracle
if it wasn't for the title, it would have taken some time for me to figure out that it was an actual bird :D
Why do no ornithopters employ feather analogs? They all have solid wings. Flight feathers form a check valve, letting air through the wing on the upstroke, and capturing it on the downstroke. This arrangement allows the bird to put a lot less energy into the upstroke (and thus not lose as much altitude). With a solid wing, you wind up pushing the craft down on the upstroke almost as much as you lift it on the downstroke.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Somehow I get the weird feeling that this is a helium filled lighter than air or at least neutral buoyancy device with wings.
On the other hand, in the video it's uncannily like a bird in its flght movements and extremely agile on turns. I'm guessing this is an experiment to work out the mechanics of creating a flapping wing rather than on figuring out how to deliver lifting power off it.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I'm surprised they let Uwe Boll rob Hitchcock's grave.
About the word? Ba-ba-ba-... *ahem*... I, for one, welcome our new cybornithological overlords.
As stated in the animation: 'pecisely twisted'. Makes me wonder.
If you post it, they will read.
Well it's very pretty. Maybe it's just me, but it also seems to me that the whole video is being played back in slowmo - like 60fps at 30. Or similar. Is there any footage of this robot that hasn't been slowed down? Sure it wouldn't be quite so sexy, nor perhaps as illustrative of it's movement. But it would give a better impression of what it actually looks like in flight.
tastes like chicken
Rovio saw it coming...
And also, real bird also depend on constant intervention of the software, i.e brain.
Birds have not evolved to handle inherently aerodynamically unstable systems. The demands on their brains are probably closer to the human pilot flying older inherently stable designs than more modern designs that can't fly without thousands of corrections per second on multiple control surfaces controlled by computers.
These lazy-ass engineers need to put some flapping wings on a car. So what the hell is a bird supposed to do besides flying and pooping on car windshields?
OK, I guess that some birds don't fly, like ostriches, dodo birds, and moas. But dodos and moas are extinct, which demonstrates the advantage of being able to fly. Oh, turkeys can't fly either, but they taste good on the dinner table during Thanksgiving and Christmas.
I hope I will live to see the day when Slashdot announces that someone has invented a real flying car. But then again, when I look at how most folks drive . . . putting them in something that flies is a recipe for disaster . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Ignited my sense of wonder after a while.
I'm not saying you're wrong,but the point of flapping is thrust not lift.
horror vacui
As for "inherent stability" - a bird is far more unstable in flight than the most exotic aircraft. The Festo design doesn't flap its wings very far. Many birds can flap their wings so that the tips meet underneath them. Watch a fair sized slow flying bird like a heron, and the wing geometry change during a single flap is very large.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The energy density of fat is close to that of Diesel fuel. Tank weight for battery weight, a Diesel car has more than 6 times the range of a battery powered car. (Nissan Leaf 100 miles, equivalent Nissan European Diesel approx. 600 miles.)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
When I was teaching physics, years ago, I used to take classes to a cliff where fulmars (a small albatross) used to fly. They would fly along the cliff edge into a side wind so slowly that you could stand there and watch them maybe three metres away, and examine the wing beat very closely. It's astonishing how slowly the wings seem to move. (I made some super-8 film of them, but the classroom experience didn't generate anything like the interest of the real-world experience.)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This is not technology that it suited for manned military flight... too slow. Much too slow.
It's more likely to be used for "security" purposes, in conflict areas and in our own urban environments. Basically, while it is easier to keep an eye on some Taliban guys, it also became easier for the cops to spy on us.
And that's what I really hate about technology. It is always available for the wrong purposes too. It just keeps getting easier and easier to covertly keep an eye on large groups of people... and it becomes easier and easier to treat all civilians as suspects, and constantly prove their innocence by covert surveillance. That is not how we're supposed to be treated by our elected governments.
in which your body needs constant corrections by your brain so that you dont fall down.
The AquaPenguin video is pretty cool too, but the eerie glowing blue eyes are creepy.
For optimal comment enjoyment, take red pill now.
has already commented on that scenario.
Wonder how long it'll take before we start killing each other with it.
Couldn't they make it with at least a little color? :-/
This is quite amazing. Such a jump from previous flying technology. The inventor/s are to be congratulated.
However it still makes me stop and reflect... after thousands of years and we have not quite got near the real thing. When we can package the flying technology, the energy conversion unit (organic matter to energy), a self-repair mechanism, a waste disposal mechanism, a self-reproducing system and autonomy into something less than 20cm long and get it to fly from Australia to East Russia and back (20,000km) each year, then we are finally getting close to what God has created. It makes us stop and think what a wonderful creation is out there.
John G
...we have the Watchbird?
And how long before it goes disastrously wrong?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Oh, turkeys can't fly either...
Wild turkey can and do fly. They can't land worth a darn, though. I was turkey hunting once when one came in for a landing nearby - it was as if God had let slip a feathered bowling ball into the woods. That bird must've crashed through 50 feet of small trees and underbrush before rolling to a stop.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
But why doesn't the video show it taking off and landing?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This bird is magnificent. The animation and the film on the web site show an elegant mechanism, beautifully implemented.
It looks as though it is behaving as a bird behaves. It looks like it is thinking like a bird. Push the wings. Look around. Choose a direction. Push the wings.
I'd love to see a pelican version, gliding in 20 knots by the beach.
Does it twitter what it sees?
Theo Jansen does this with terrestrial animoids.
I'm not saying you're wrong,but the point of flapping is thrust not lift.
It's both, actually. However, a wing is probably not going to generate a lot of lift on the upstroke, so why pour a lot of energy into it? When you look at bird musculature, they have huge muscles for pulling the wing down, but for pulling it up - not so much.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It's pretty cool and all but if they wanted it to be realistic it would have flown into one of the windows panes.
The bird is amazing, but why is their site right-aligned in my browser?
I watched the video, and it reminds me a lot of the Tim bird: http://www.amazon.com/Schylling-NTN-Tim-Bird/dp/B000ELORZO.
Not to take away from what they've done, but it really does seem to fly like Tim. So basically the Tim toy with an electric motor instead of a wound up rubber band, and maybe remote control to help steer. Ok, granted it looks like the head moves but I wasn't blown away.
Still its pretty cool, but I didn't see them do anything awesome. How about gliding? Seems pretty basic to me, flap, flap flap, glide like a real bird.
I'm sure that the permeability of the wing to air helps reduce the resistance on the upstroke, but I think that the twist on the upstroke allows the wing to cut through the air, whilst the wing is held parallel to the ground on the down-stroke, providing the lift. Importantly, forward motion may be provided by retaining an angle on the upstroke, so energy isn't completely wasted here. I'm sure that new materials will provide refinements on this model and your suggestion may well be one of them.
I'm not an expert on flapping-wing aircraft, but you can also acheive low drag on upstroke by rotating the wing so it has the lowest angle-of-attack, and then turning it back so it blocks the most wind on the downstroke.
Birds, having been created by the blind idiot-god evolution, favored (in the appropriate non-intelligent sense) wings that didn't have to do such tricks -- like you say, with feathers, you need a relatively simple flapping motion because they automatically reduce profile on the upstroke and increase it on the downstroke.
Whether the rotating option is better depends on the specifics of the system, and the designers probably found that they could get a better overall structure by not having feathers and optimizing for the no-feather case by having more complicated wing motion (and more complicated software to handle it).
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
I'm not saying you're wrong,but the point of flapping is thrust not lift.
So they used to think. But that didn't explain how many birds can achieve vertical gain without horizontal motion.
Festo does it again. Festo is a German robotics firm, and a very good one. Each year, they do a technical tour de force like this as a demo. They've previously done a swimming dolphin robot, a lighter-than-air flying jellyfish, and several other projects. Their overall direction is to learn to control very flexible systems, moving robotics away from the very rigid machines currently used.
American companies used to do things like that in the 1950s and 1960s. Japanese companies did that until the 1990s. When a country stops doing this, its technological dominance is over.
I've a feeling it has a lot to do with weight. Invent a light enough feather analog and a way of anchoring it with control for each feather, and you might be onto something. From the documentation on the website, "SmartBird has a total weight of around 400 grams and a wingspan of 2 metres". If you can duplicate that once you invent your lightweight feather system, you're onto something. -W
...targeted bird droppings.
Smart targeted bird droppings
Point a rocket up. "Thrust" becomes "lift."
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
I've a feeling it has a lot to do with weight. Invent a light enough feather analog and a way of anchoring it with control for each feather, and you might be onto something.
No problem. Drill holes in the wing, and glue these on the underside.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
How come all the aeronautic breakthroughs always come from Germany ? Hmm!!!
And those feathers act sort of like propellers.
The lift is provided by the shape of the wing and the way air flows over it.
All we need now is a humping robot.
Safe a lot in Jet Fuel!!