In
recent years there has been a lot of effort put into making very small flying
robots the size of large insects or small birds. The design of these micro
aerial vehicles is based on bird flight, that is they are ornithopters as they have wings that flap, but so far they don’t tweet. Birds do it and bees do it so why not
educated robots?
Getting
them to fly forwards, or to hover and go backwards like a humming bird is now
possible. This leaves the next big challenge, which is to get them to fly and
perch. Ideally it would be nice for one to flap its way towards its handler and
perch on his/her wrist like a peregrine coming to a falconer.
Now
it seems that the research engineers at the U of Illinois have cracked it
(1,2). They have built their flying robot with a wingspan of 16 inches. Its
wings can bend and twist independently and it uses that ability to control its
direction. It has a flat tail like a bird, but no vertical tail fin, that would
be too un-bird like and would never do.
The
feedback control system feeds in corrective information every 50 milliseconds
so it is thinking quite quickly. The clever thing is that its thinking about
what its doing not in terms of speed over the ground, up or down, nor right and
left, but of its physical position in its world – only a room so far as it
hasn’t been allowed out yet.
Its
algorithms allow it to fly up to a perch, slow, take a head up position and
perch on a chair or a hand. So far there is no raucous squawk or pretty
birdsong. The aerodynamics are analyzed in the paper (2) so that we have the
information to design our thinking ornithopter that could swoop down and perch
on the fence to dissuade our neighbors cat from using our seed bed as a litter
tray.
The
government may have grander plans for it, maybe they could release flocks to
mark visits by foreign dignitaries, which would be cheaper and less messy than
pigeons.
- http://news.discovery.com/tech/perching-robot-bird-120504.html
- http://blogs.discovery.com/files/perching-robot.pdf
