Humingbird Robot Doesn’t Look Enough Like A Hummingbird
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 31 of December , 2009 at 6:22 am
With all due respect to Professor Hiroshi Ryu of Chiba University in Japan, if you’re going to come out with a little flying robot and call it a ‘hummingbird’ robot, it’s much less impressive if you do so six months after the AeroEnvironment flapping wing NAV that actually looks, and operates, exactly like a hummingbird. But still, this robot (which looks a bit more like an airplane) does flap its wings, although it can’t yet fly backwards. It weighs only 2.6 grams and is controlled via infrared. By 2011, it should be able to carry a little camera, at which point it will probably look a lot like this:
That’s the DelFly Micro, a flapping wing ornithopter that we wrote about in July of 2008, when it was flying around capturing footage with a built-in wireless color camera. Oh, and it looks like a slightly larger version has figured out how to flap around autonomously, avoiding walls and obstacles:
Awfully clever, I’d say, and this video is nearly a year old. What’s been going on with the DelFly since then? I’m not entirely sure, but I hope we find out sometime soon… If we don’t, what that means is that you won’t find yourself looking at one of these unless you’re in a lot of trouble with the secret police. The Dutch secret police.
VIA [ Physorg ]
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Category: Research
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Comment by eli
Made Friday, 1 of January , 2010 at 7:31 am
oh my… i love that :)
