BotJunkie is merging with Automaton to form the best robotics blog on the Net! Please continue
following our stories at our new home and update your RSS reader with our new feed. See you there!

Festo CyberKite

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 7 of December , 2009 at 5:17 am

“Controlling the forces of nature has been a dream of humankind since time immemorial. With the CyberKite, Festo is meeting this challenge as part of the Bionic Learning Network and is developing a kite system with a cybernetic control unit.”

Why? Because robot penguin, that’s why!

But seriously, I have no idea, besides that it’s an interesting project to tackle… Although come to think of it, I suppose it could have some commercial applications, too.

[ Festo ]

Comments (3)

Category: General

3 Comments

Comment by teflon3d

Made Monday, 7 of December , 2009 at 8:45 am

FYI,
their other stuff is much more interesting. Nice heavy accent on biomorphic design on their site,
beautiful work! -teflon

Comment by Voytek

Made Monday, 7 of December , 2009 at 8:50 am

Why? This is exactly what you need to generate power with a kite. You let the kite pull the cables out generating energy. Then you change the kite’s profile and pull spool the cables in with little force. Then again let it produce lift pulling on the cables and generating energy. There are other approaches to this as well. Check out the video here, it explains it:
http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/08/05/kite-power-delft-univerity-of-technology/

Comment by anonymous coward

Made Wednesday, 9 of December , 2009 at 2:05 am

on the ocean, skysails reduces energy consumption by 10%-30% (skysails.info). they slowly add ships to their fleet.

Leave a comment

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

What Is BotJunkie?

From the folks who brought you OhGizmo.com, BotJunkie obsessively chronicles Man's inevitable descent into cybernetic slavery.

One robot at a time.