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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."
/dev/null
Patent trolls take note - 40 year old prior art.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
You of course meant the /dev/zero.
/dev/null is only good for writing into.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
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.
63cm wingspan? I don't know where this inventor is from, but I've never seen a live dragonfly with a wingspan anywhere near that.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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.
I read that book in my childhood - great to see it finally come to real life!
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/727375.Danny_Dunn_Invisible_Boy
Makes me shudder to think how many other sci-fi stories from childhood will come to real life.
/dev/null is only good for writing into.
Yes, thus answering the question "Who am I supposed to contact to whine about the new vote up/down buttons on stories?".
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!