Robothopter in biomimetic butterfly boffinry breakthrough Japanese aerobiomimetics boffins have developed a tiny ornithopter modelled on a swallowtail butterfly. Here's the obligatory Youtube Flash vid; apologies to those of you reading this on your iPads. According to Hiroto Tanaka and Isao Shimoyama, the team behind the diminutive flying flapper-bot, the fact that it flies is …
Looks in the video like it was losing height, and very much slow motion judging by the hand behind it. In which case at full speed it probably dropped like a stone.
I can flap my arms and fall like a brick, I'll be more impressed when I see a video showing several seconds of flight time.
After all, people were using gliders before they used powered flight (with the exception of hot air balloons, natch).
So using mechanical actuation on something this small has caused it to drop slower. Next stop, make that work better so that it can sustain hieght/climb.
Interesting stuff - even twenty years ago this sort of stuff would have been the fevered dream of a madman, huzzah for progress, eh?
Steven R
If you've ever watched a butterfly fly, like me you would have been amazed at just how fast and seemingly uncontrolled their flight looks - but then they manage to alight on the flower they were after*.
I still can't figure out how they do it, but I'm sure there are deep philosophical implications to flapping about like a loony, being blown hither and thither, but still ending up where you wanted to be.
*Either that or they are good at looking very nonchalant about ending up on the wrong flower :)
I'm thinking how similar this looks to a rubber-band powered flying toy my brother had when we were kids - and that's nearer forty years ago!
It was a mini flying bird / butterfly, with a mechanical linkage like this one and a thin polythene membrane for wings. Obviously it was impossibly delicate, especially in the hands of two under tens, and it lasted about three ten-second flights before a wing split in a nose over on landing.
I guess the cleverness here is to make it light enough to fly, but strong enough to withstand the attentions of a standard issue grunt. Or are they going to redeploy highly trained Top Gun pilots onto butterfly duty if they complain too much about the despised roboplane flying armchairs.
Instead of choosing some random flying insect, working out how it flies (which turns out to be *very* strangely by human standards) and then building a hardware mimic these guys found the simplest flying motion insect *first* then worked out how to model it.
Now that's engineering.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
