How Bionic Wings Are Reinventing Drones

drones are awesome they deliver life-saving medical supplies in India help catch poaches in Africa and can pollinate plants in vertical Farms but drones of today do have some limitations so I've been researching how bionic Wings can be used to make drones fly instead I even brought one for myself to try out later in this video I think bionic Wings really caught my attention because they enable drones to fly with Incredible maneuverability and stealth the fact they can glide also means they can much more efficiently use the energy stored on board later in this video I'll be flying that bionic drone that I brought so that we can see some of the benefits and drawbacks of it in person but first how do these bionic Wings really work to answer this I started by looking at some research into how real flying creatures actually use their wings and I'll never be able to look at a bird in the same way again there are so many variables working together in complex ways that researchers actually had to build robot Birds to test in Wind tunnels to fully understand and copy wings but is this all just research or reality we'll be looking at some pretty amazing examples of bionic drones so you can judge for yourself okay back to looking at real birds so we can try and understand what these flapping wings are doing for our bionic drones what I found out is that in reality wings are folding twisting and bending and the wind tunnel studies show that these aerodynamic moves increase energy efficiency for one thing wings enable Birds to easily adjust speed even the humble Sparrow has great abilities to fly at speed and then quickly stop and land on a tiny twig even more incredible aerobatic control is seen in Swifts which we'll see a bionic version of later in this video they do almost everything including mating in midair Eagles and Falcons on the other hand transition from flying to gliding in a heartbeat turn tight circles and swoop down to the ground so quietly they prey doesn't know what's hit them birds are also really responsive to changing conditions if they want to change direction they change the shape of an individual wing and alter the angles to get more lift it's not just birds or insects that we're mimicking though there are also bats which fly in a slightly different way bats are the only mammals that fly and their wings are actually hands with extremely long fingers covered by wafer thin skin connected to over 24 joints including thumbs and feet eat the way they fly is actually a bit like swimming butterfly like birds they achieve thrust through Newton's third law of motion pushing air down with their webt hands to get lift on the upstroke they then tuck their wings in to stop being pushed down again they also control the curvature of their wing depending on what they're doing giving them incredible maneuverability it's no wonder that researchers and Engineers are so interested in trying to mimic These Wings but now we've seen some of the theory it's about time to try one of these flapping drones for ourselves after throwing away the instructions I got to work putting the Drone together and whilst I do this it's the perfect time to tell you about oppra who made this video possible oppra is a free mobile browser that makes searching the web easier and safer than ever when doing research for this video I often found words that I didn't understand but I could just ask the AI assistant Arya to help me out after asking the question Arya provides instant answers with clickable links where I can find out more oppra also comes with an inbuilt ad and tracker blocker and a VPN for enhanced privacy and security although Ario won't build my drone for me with Opera I can add a personalized wallpaper and customize my news feed so I only see news topics I want to see Now's the Time to upgrade your browser to a safer and more efficient one so get opera at the link below or by scanning this QR code and just like that I'd finished building the Drone I found the mechanisms in it truly fascinating converting the high-speed rotation from the motor into a flapping Motion in the wings before long it was time for the first test flight in my kitchen so here is the maiden voyage and I can't imagine anything going wrong let's see if I can get it to Glide off the table where you can see it given the limited success I decided to go somewhere with a little more space though that didn't go without a hitch [Music] either we have left off after finally finding a big enough space it was time to really see what the Drone could do I have to say I was pretty impressed watching it fly around the controls were not great but I could really feel how quickly it was able to change direction and glide efficiently when I cut the power there were still a good number of crashes but I can't blame the Drone for all of them now we've had a good look at what can be done with commercially available drones what about ones that you can't buy yet it was time to look at the projects from some of my fellow Engineers first up the bionic flying fox by automation company festo its wingspan is an impressive 228 CM but it still only weighs 580 G the ultra light and flexible wings are made out of a durable honeycomb elastan which is coated in two airtight films connected to the articulated joints these are on one plane so that the wing can move individually it's launched and landed by humans in in a defined airspace on a set flight path fed to onboard Electronics by a Central Computer once Airborne the Flying Fox is on autopilot it not only calculates the best way of moving its wings to achieve the flight path but through motion capture and machine learning improves its performance with each circuit what festo calls intelligent kinematics which is essentially the motion of mechanical points however most of the bionic Wing developments I've seen are actually based on birds and when it comes to aerobatics hummingbirds are in a class of their own their wings move in a figure of eight shape almost like sails as you can see from this mechanical Recreation with powerful wings and very light bodies they can fly upside down and even backwards this is another mechanical engineering design that shows the complex shifting and tilting axes of the bird's joints these create elegant motion and fierce efficiency especially bearing in mind that the real wings are moving way faster than this they're so tiny that the bionic version is called a nano air vehicle developed by air environment with funding from America's defense Advanced research projects agency it was unveiled in 2011 as the surveillance Hummingbird at about 15 cm long and with a roughly equal wingspan it weighs about the same as a ablea battery and the soft structure of the Wings dampen the woring sound it's Nimble and natural looking flies outdoors and conduct through Doorway to see what's going on inside this incredible little bird made the front cover of the Time Magazine back in 2011 and is still being used by researchers today to uncover secrets of wing design but as incredible as it is 10 years later one of the engineers who worked on the project said that given the chance he'd still like to work on its wing flapping mechanism to make it even quieter and more stable for better quality video capture flapping Wing drones in their current state do have some other drawbacks though they're highly complex and challenging to scale up meaning the current payloads remain pretty small they can be more challenging to control relatively fragile and still have pretty limited flying times but they have such potential that research teams are working hard on improving Wing design and materials I came across some interesting Research into improving the Wing's efficiency by finding the best angle between it and the body of the Drone using a specially designed platform researchers tested the aerodynamic properties of 21 Wing designs and angles they found that tilting the wing down at -3° improveed the overall efficiency of flight this is because the smaller angles resulted in a smoother air flow and therefore more lift other research went even deeper to look at how they could increase the stability and payload they did this by looking at how elastic The Joint connecting the wing to the muscle should be through a series of experiments the researchers actually found that by restricting the amount the wing could rotate it increased the lift by 16% in real conditions and reduced energy consumption by 10% so by tweaking the angle of the wing and restricting movement in the joint they've been able to improve lift Energy Efficiency stability and potentially increase the payload but as one viewer commented they might have been able to have increased lift if the wings were permeable and that brings us to what might be the most Innovative bionic drone I've seen the bionic Swift it's designer materials imitate a bird so Nimble that it can eat bathe and mate midair and has been known to stay airborne for 10 months festo's amazingly aerobatic flying robot can perform tight turns and Loops largely down to its wings they are more energy efficient than any other model because they copy Bird's plumage with individual membranes made of ultra light robust foam laid across each other like scales connected to the Wing by a carbon quill the membranes pull together for increased lift on the downstroke and fan out to let air through on the upstroke so they use less energy to lift up the wings and generate more power to fly when they're closed and push the air down with tiny intricate and intelligent Motors and mechanisms in the body the bionic Swift adjusts Wing beat frequency and its tail angle with Precision according to the flight maneuver needed it also flies as part of a small swarm using GPS and Ultra wideband radio communication five of these bionic birds can even fly together in a controlled space on a pre-programmed flight path and if the wind conditions or thermal conditions were to change they can automatically correct themselves without the need of a human pilot this shows the enormous potential that bionic Wings coupled with AI have to potentially revolutionize drone technology as for the flight duration of bionic Birds they seem to be increasing all the time the longest flight time I've seen as of recording this is from a university over in China their homing pigeon apparently flew for just over 3 hours on a single charge and blended into its natural environment so well that a raptor tried to attack it and left scratches on the body it's easy to see why bionic drones have so much to offer especially when coupled with artificial intelligence AI is already making huge inroads with propeller drones beating human pilots in a number of races although there's still a long way to go before the average drone flies like an eagle there is intense military interest a sign of more development to come I think it's a safe bet that bionic Wings will play a part in the future of drones and as you're still watching please subscribe to the channel and if you want to see more about birds you have to go check out my friends over at Planet wild they make loads of awesome documentaries about projects that are protecting the natural world like this one on bringing a little owl back from Extinction another one of my favorites from them is when they found a genius way to revive a poisoned River you can also support these projects and join their community to keep track of everything they're doing and be part of their great work and for the first 200 of you who go and support their project with the link in the description I'll even pay for your first month or you can just use the code zeroth directly on their website they work with loads of great local nonprofits to make sure they're having a positive impact wherever they go so definitely go check them out with this link to their video thanks for watching

Channel: Ziroth

Views: 1,845,721

Keywords: Science, Engineering, STEM, Electric, Zero, Tesla, News, Research, EV, Battery, drone, flight, wings

Id: vr0z2huKaCI

Length: 12min 26sec (746 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 03 2023