Bionic Swift
Written by Lucy Black   
Sunday, 05 July 2020

Festo builds some amazing things and it has just released information on its new Bionic Swift, which has to be seen to be believed.

Festo is an automation company based in Esslingen, Germany, and it really only builds bionic robots to demonstrate how good it is at automation - but it really should think about forming a robot company. Over the years they have produced some amazing devices and the latest, the Bionic Swift is perhaps the most graceful of the lot. Each bird weighs just 42 grams and, as you can see from the video, they amost fly without effort and there's a flock of them.

bionicswift2

The use of artifical feathers allows the device to fly like a real bird. The feathers pivot open on the up stroke to allow the air to pass through and then close on the down stroke providing the thrust to lift the bird.

 

You can see from the video that complicated flight manouvers are possible - just like a real bird. All of this from just one motor and two servos. Navigation is by way of high accuracy indoor GPS. The birds are controlled by a central computer that knows their position and can make flight course corrections in real time.

The reason Festo gives for building the bird is:

"The intelligent networking of flight objects and GPS routing makes for a 3D navigation system that could be used in the networked factory of the future. The precise localisation of the flow of materials and goods could, for example, improve process sequences and foresee bottlenecks. Moreover, autonomous flying robots could be used to transport materials, for instance, and thus optimise the use of space within a factory with their flight corridors."

Perhaps, but my guess is that they just wanted to build it...

bionicswift

More Information

BionicSwift

Related Articles

How Festo Built a Bird       

Is It A bird? No It's A Festo Robot       

Festo's BionicSoftArm and Hand

Festo's Flying Fox And Spider Robots Are Worth Seeing

Festo's Ants And Butterflies

Festo's BionicKangaroo       

Festo's Dragonfly

Hands That Learn To Hold

 

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

 

Banner


VLOGGER - AI Does Talking Heads
24/03/2024

Developed by Google researchers VLOGGER AI is a system that can create realistic videos of people talking and moving from a single still image and an audio clip as input. 



Angular and Wiz To Merge
27/03/2024

Two web development frameworks used at Google are merging. One, Angular is open source and widely known, while the other, Wiz, is an internal web framework developed and used by Google for some o [ ... ]


More News

raspberry pi books

 

Comments




or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info

Last Updated ( Sunday, 04 April 2021 )