Flying insect-like robot Gimball can crash and recover(bbc.co.uk)
bbc.co.uk
Flying insect-like robot Gimball can crash and recover
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24758935
4 comments
Real Genius - 1985
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfbqJpn8fN8
though it did suffer from a launch problem or possibly a design problem... :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfbqJpn8fN8
though it did suffer from a launch problem or possibly a design problem... :)
Previous discussion (yesterday):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6640431
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6640431
+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?
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.
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.
Also, flies are tiny and move pretty slowly. A bird doesn't recover from flying into a wall very well.
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.
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.