Festo's Drone Dragonfly Takes To the Air

yyzmcleod writes "Building on the work of last year's bionic creation, the Smart Bird, Festo announced that it will literally launch its latest creation, the BionicOpter, at Hannover Messe in April. With a wingspan of 63 cm and weighing in at 175 grams, the robotic dragonfly mimics all forms of flight as its natural counterpart, including hover, glide and maneuvering in all directions. This is made possible, the company says, by the BionicOpter's ability to move each of its four wings independently, as well as control their amplitude, frequency and angle of attack. Including its actuated head and body, the robot exhibits 13 degrees of freedom, which allows it to rapidly accelerate, decelerate, turn and fly backwards."

Comments

Another triumph from Festo

[Animats]

Very nice. Festo, which is a German industrial robotics firm, does a technical tour de force every year. They built a robotic bird two years ago. In 2009, they built a robot penguin" which swims beautifully.

Festo does this to sell their industrial robotics systems, which are very well made.

Re:Another triumph from Festo

[Moofie]

The power tools built by their subsidiary are works of art.

http://festoolusa.com/

Re:That's one big dragonfly

[Longjmp]

No, you haven't seen one, but they existed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meganeura

Re:Open loop control system?

[Attila the Bun]

I was under the impression that a control system implies a closed loop or feedback mechanism

Feedback is a great way to stabilise a system, but it is not essential. A stepper motor - even a precise one, like the one in your watch - does not require readback from a position encoder to function. Digital audio amplifiers do not need negative feedback in order to achieve proper linearity, like analogue amplifiers do.

Sometimes it is desirable to do without feedback. The auto-focus mechanism in a professional camera operates without feedback in order to work at the highest possible speed. The lens motor and AF sensor are carefully calibrated so that focus is achieved in a single measurement-movement cycle. This is faster than making multiple measurements, which requires the lens motor to be stopped during each measurement. Feedback is only used to confirm autofocus success, and trigger a second attempt in case of failure.

Re:Collective Pitch

[camperdave]

While angle of attack is accurate in describing rotor action, it's more commonly used to describe the angle at which a craft's nose cuts into the wind to offset the angle of sideslip in determine a heading.

I've never heard angle of attack described that way. It's always described as the angle of the chord of the wing relative to the direction of the airflow - the pitch of the wing, not the yaw of the aircraft.