Flying insect-like robot Gimball can crash and recover

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24758935

by poissonpie • 13 years ago

39 8 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

gannoq• 13 years ago

+videos from http://weborganizm.org/river/stream/2829

How do flies do it? They don't have protective cages. Why doesn't a fly's wings break when it crashes? Why can't we replicate it mechanically?

snoonan• 13 years ago

My initial thought is that insect wings don't rotate, and so can't destroy themselves so easily. Cheap, powerful rotational motors comes with the risk of potential for self destruction.

Flapping at that scale is a very hard problem. Apart from the microscopic flagellum, evolution never managed to produce a rotational motor since it's super hard to build decoupled components with biological hardware (you need two stomachs, hearts, etc to keep decoupled parts alive). Emulating a fly's actual method may be interesting research, but motors are probably better in the long run than flapping, a complex and difficult hack to the problem of flight.

Chestofdraw• 13 years ago

Also, flies are tiny and move pretty slowly. A bird doesn't recover from flying into a wall very well.

Hellenion• 13 years ago

Flies have an exoskeleton which, unlike the quadcopters of our engineers, have many flexible parts. This is much like the cage only in a very different configuration. I don't know about the wings in particular, but I can imagine they are more flexible than brittle and may even be capable of growing scar tissue.

parley• 13 years ago

Here's a similar one the Japanese DOD (?) showed off a few years ago, I think, so I suppose the single-rotor (or dual on same axis) flying sphere with flaps has been around for a while: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF0uLnMoQZA

It's also supposed to be able to bump, roll and stuff, but it looks like the OP has improved on the idea quite a bit with the independent suspension/crash cage.

YooLi• 13 years ago

Real Genius - 1985

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfbqJpn8fN8

though it did suffer from a launch problem or possibly a design problem... :)

ksrm• 13 years ago

Previous discussion (yesterday):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6640431

Flying insect-like robot Gimball can crash and recover

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