It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's...Both?

Among the world's wonders, Leonardo da Vinci marveled at how birds fly, mulling over possible mechanics in what became his Codex on the Flight of Birds. He hit upon some relevant physical properties such as inertia and fluidity, going “straight to the heart of how birds fly, asking a series of very specific questions,” Richard Prum, an ornithologist at Yale University, told Audubon in "Decoding da Vinci." “It’s fantastic, almost eerie, how much progress he made.”

Imagine his reaction if da Vinci saw SmartBird (featured in the video above), a manmade airplane based on the look and movement of a herring gull. Created by a team led by Markus Fischer, of the German technology company Festo, the agile avi-plane flaps its 6.5-foot wings just like a bird. Weighing in at less than a pound, it’s ultralight, which contributes to its energy efficiency through air: Its overall energy consumption at takeoff is about 25 Watts, and 60-80 Watts (that’s like an incandescent light bulb) in flight.

Okay, awesome. But, why IS it? In short, judging by Festo’s website and a talk Fischer gave to a TED audience, it serves as an example of efficient automation based on ideas that researchers can apply elsewhere to solve bigger industrial problems. You’ve probably heard of biomimicry; SmartBird seems to embody the concept from wing to flapping wing.

Below are videos of two more animal-inspired designs by Festo.

Comments

Two other uncommon additions

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thanks for the info odalari

How long will it be until

How long will it be until everything is electronically controlled. Who needs to clone anything when you can make an exact electronic replica and have it act exactly like the normal thing. I can't even imagine what this world will be like in another 50 years.
Crystal Awards

The bird contains the great

The bird contains the great technology which are given by god but what our main is that how we can implement the bird flying technology in our world.

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Its a great technology i

Its a great technology i seen here through youtube video. Great understanding of birds and relate with technology.

HDMI Splitter

Who gives a crap about

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Interesting video, It is

Interesting video, It is very difficult to judge that this is man-made bird. No one can judge if this bird is flying on sky.

Decoding elementary science

Decoding elementary science in spite of willful refusals to do by many too many experts. In the name of scientific integrity will someone with appropriate expertise, please, pray tell us, what scientists and experts with appropriate expertise have known, based upon the best availabile scientific evidence, about the population dynamics of the human species? During my lifetime, what did so-called experts know and when did you know it? Why the worldwide conspiracy of silence concerning human overpopulation issues in the past 66 years?

The family of humanity as well as much of life as we know it are now here inhabitants of a finite planet with a frangible environment that is failing fast. What really matters is being inadvertently ruined on our watch by the human population, but is not being openly discussed. My ‘blood boils’ in the truth that we have possessed knowledge of so much about ourselves as human beings with feet of clay and acknowledged so little about what has been known for so long about our distinctly human creatureliness, based upon extensive empirical research and unchallenged scientific evidence. Elective mutism and silent consent in the face of the reckless degradation, relentless dissipation and willful sell-off of what everyone knows to be sacred looks to me like the worst of all precipitants of the colossal ecological wreckage that appears in the offing.

Inside and outside the community of top rank scientists, as well as among first class professionals in demography and economics who claim appropriate expertise in issues concerning human overpopulation, one issue is not being discussed by anyone. A worldwide conspiracy of silence continues to prevail about the population dynamics of the human species. The last of the last taboos is the open discussion of extant scientific research of human population dynamics. The implications of this astounding denial of what could somehow be real are potentially profound for the future of life on Earth, I suppose.

Within the human community a tiny minority of self-proclaimed masters of the universe hold the ‘destiny’ of all in their hands. This elite group is operating behind the scenes these days and “growing” the global economy to such a colossal scale that it could soon become patently unsustainable on a planet with the size, composition and ecology of Earth because our planetary home is not, definitely not “too big to fail.”

Hurry up, please, it is time for speaking out loudly, clearly and often before it is too late for human action to matter. Like it or not, ready or not, intellectually honest and morally courageous scientists have unassumed responsibilities to science.... and unfulfilled duties to humanity that must be performed.

this is quite interesting,

this is quite interesting, great.

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Reminds me of a thing that

Reminds me of a thing that shouldn't fly. Like Bumble bee where the laws of aerodynamics prove that it should be incapable of flight, as it does not have the capacity (in terms of wing size or beats per second) to achieve flight with the degree of wing loading necessary.

it is a norm :)

it is a norm :)