What a difference a hip replacement can make! Not only for humans but also for this ornithopter, a flapping-wing robot that is work-in-progress at the University of Seville's GRVC Robotics Lab.
This short video has the long title "Optimal elastic wing for flapping-wing robots through passive morphing" and it is pretty much self explanatory:
As a prelude there's a close up of the robot's flapping style, slowed down by a factor of eight, while it is tethered to the bench. Next, still in slow motion, we see an experiment in which the wing angle is set to 30°, in order to demonstrate the effect of a sub-optimal angle. In this case the flight performance decreases and is even worse that employing the wing without the joint and we see the ornithopter unable to stay in the air.
The joint upgrade has the effect of restricting wing pitch rotation, This eliminates the deformation of the wings, that produced a rolling and sliding flight and now we see the orithopter flying automatically and stably while performing a climb.
While this flapping-wing robots is not as visually stunning as Festo's flock of Bionic Swifts, the researchers at the GRVC Robotics Laboratory, C. Ruiz, J.Á. Acosta and A. Ollero, do provide an explanation of what the research is aiming to achieve:
Flapping wing robots show promise as platforms for safe and efficient flight in near-human operations, thanks to their ability to agile maneuver or perch at a low Reynolds number. The growing trend in the automatization of these robots has to go hand in hand with an increase in the payload capacity. This work provides a new passive morphing wing prototype to increase the payload of this type of UAV. The prototype is based on a biased elastic joint and the holistic research also includes the modelling, simulation and optimization scheme, thus allowing to adapt the prototype for any flapping wing robot.
An earlier video shows the ornithopter autonomously flying outdoors, around a field of sunflowers to be exact and crop monitoring would be a task that could be within its capabilities, The project is funded by a Griffin ERC Advanced Grant, which explains the ghostly apparition superimposed on this video:
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