
It Flies: Da Vinci's Dream Comes True - richardofyork
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/04/11/135300971/it-flies-davincis-dream-comes-true
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makmanalp
Festo is well known in the industry for making very elegant and graceful demos
like that:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_citFkSNtk>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhfFnEQM1aU>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zih1lB5-GZg>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG82USg5mtE>

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skue
Funny how Festo's SmartBird has been posted to HN multiple times over the past
few months, but never voted up:
[http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+sma...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+smartbird)

Proof that having a good HN headline matters!

~~~
FrojoS
I believe its because there was a TED talk about the Smart Bird posted a few
days ago [1]. So now all the US media talks about it.

[1]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg_JcKSHUtQ&feature=chann...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg_JcKSHUtQ&feature=channel_video_title)

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run4yourlives
Hello DoD? Yes, we've built the most revolutionary battlefield surveillance
tool since the airplane. You want 4500 of them? Sweet.

Talk about hiding in plain sight.

~~~
Someone
Have you checked the wingspan (6 feet) and the weight (17 ounces; IIRC, that
is about a pound)?

Exaggerating: this thing almost floats in air. I think you can forget about
adding any load to it, or about deploying it in rain or wind.

It is a great technological accomplishment, but I think it needs quite some
improvements before it will be of practical use.

~~~
kevinchen
Even if it can't carry cargo one day, it could still be outfitted with a tiny
camera, some sort of radio, and maybe a little onboard storage. Paint it like
a bird, and boom — a sneaky surveillance system.

[Somebody's already said this, huh?]

~~~
Someone
I do not think that would prevent this from being blown away (maybe even to
pieces) on almost any day of the year.

Birds its size weigh roughly ten times as much.

Also, I did not notice them publish top speed or range. I guess is those still
leave something to be desired.

~~~
hugh3
_I do not think that would prevent this from being blown away (maybe even to
pieces) on almost any day of the year_

Maybe, but make 'em cheap enough and at least you've forced the enemy to waste
time and bullets shooting at birds.

Battery life is no doubt an issue though.

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richardofyork
I am always fascinated with flying like superman (who hasn't been), and this
gives me confidence that one day humans can fly with a similar bird-like
mechanical device, not a jetpack or massive engine on our backs.

I always thought if we copy nature, we will be very successul in engineering a
device to allow humans to fly gracefully and safely.

~~~
eru
The problem is that compared to birds humans are very heavy in relation to any
of their cross sections. Thus we can not produce enough lift in air. We would
require enormous wings. Big birds tend to glide more than they flutter. Fixed
wings aren't a bad approximation for birds our size.

~~~
richardofyork
Sure thing, but we are smart enough to do better than piston engines and gas
turbines used in aircrafts.

I am confident we will one day discover another form of energy, so we can
build aircrafts that do not require jet propulsion engines and induction
engines. In fact, such a new form of energy will be necessary for us to fly at
and possibly beyond the speed of light. And this will allow us to go deep into
outer space and other galaxies.

I always thought if we can somehow ride photons, like hop on and go for a
ride, then we can move at the speed of light. But right now I am only a
programmer, I leave that to the Rocket Scientists to figure out :)

~~~
jules
Current scientific knowledge says that going faster than light is impossible.

~~~
6ren
I like Larry Niven's response to this: maybe [they] have different theories.

To be fair, OP was talking about the future.

~~~
gnaritas
Where do people get this idea that future science disproves past science? It
really doesn't work that way. We're not going to suddenly discover all of
modern physics is wrong and oh hey look, it's easy to travel faster than
light; that just isn't going to happen.

~~~
3pt14159
More like the following:

Newton discovered that F = ma, and that acceleration was the amount of speed
gained per second. When he said this people were all like "man, if we could
only find a vacuum we could take a small amount of mass and a large amount of
force and move something faster than the speed of light!" (Which they semi
knew due to some sort of cosmological event.) But Einstein came by and said
"hold up, Newton is right for slow moving things, but as you approach C most
of the force goes into increasing the mass of the object."

Imagine it goes the other way, in a few years some guy says "Einstein was
right, but he didn't take into account the fact that we can effect the Plank
constant within a certain radius of an horizon-tangle-event, so we can
actually build something that will change the relative size of space around us
and effectively move faster than the speed of light."

And back and forth all day.

~~~
thret
You are of course referring to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive>

Which does not actually break Einsteins limit, although it does work like a
Star Trek warp-drive. Of course the energy requirements are virtually
impossible to satisfy in addition to all of the other problems.

~~~
gmaslov
> Of course the energy requirements are virtually impossible to satisfy in
> addition to all of the other problems.

That's what they used to say about powered flight ;)

~~~
thret
Perhaps, but you are comparing Jupiters to raisins.

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mhb
The making of the bird:

<http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/11369_11468.htm#id_11468>

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Tyrant505
When you can add the the total wing tuck, it will greatly increase the
mobility.

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yardie
_The breakthrough here was to design wings that torque and twist differently
in many different places giving this machine more of the lift, propulsion and
flight options a real bird would have._

You know who else designed wings that twisted? The Wright Brothers. Think
about how different air travel would be if they weren't so greedy with their
patent.

~~~
lotharbot
The primary advantage of the Wright brothers' "wing warping" was low-speed
maneuverability. The smaller the control surface, the more airspeed you need.
For the Wright brothers, virtually the entire wing was a control surface, so
they were able to control their aircraft; Richard Pearse [0] used ailerons for
his flights earlier in the year, and had only minimal control.

The reason wing warping isn't used much has little to do with the Wright's
patent. While many pre-WWI aircraft used wing warping (such as the Etrich
Taube [1]), as airspeeds increased, smaller control surfaces became adequate,
and the lower strength of warpable wings doomed them to obsolescence. The F-22
Raptor [2], a modern highly-maneuverable aircraft, has control surfaces all
over its wings, giving it all the advantages of wing warping without the
disadvantage of reduced wing strength.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse> [1]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etrich_Taube> [2]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F22_Raptor>

~~~
yardie
The particular UAV in the article is a plane shaped like a seagull. I doubt
speed was requirement. The fact is aircraft have gotten faster since the
Wright brothers and airframes have also gotten much stronger. Ailerons with
ailerons you gained high-speed maneuverability at the cost of low-speed.

Since then, engineers have been trying to find more elaborate ways of
regaining lowspeed flight maneuverability by adding more control surfaces.
Flaps, for example extend the wing to increase the chamber. It might not be
warping in the traditional context but they have definitely warped the airflow
to the same effect.

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schmave2
It's Orwellian that the name given to a mechanical bird that is inferior in
nearly every way to the real thing is "Smart." Its sole redeeming quality is
the ability to be put to use by the military.

The author of the article claims that these machines are "celebrations of
life," but to me they seem much more like celebrations of human control.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Only military applications? Really?

Consider: mass produced smart birds serving as open wifi access points,
providing a network mesh that could span entire continents and is nearly
impossible for any organization or government to censor or destroy.

~~~
schmave2
Why is it nearly impossible for an organization to censor or destroy such a
network? How is using fake birds such a big difference from using stationary
access points?

Who is going to pay to build such a thing?

~~~
InclinedPlane
You'd have to seek out and destroy nearly every node to disable it, otherwise
it could just route around any damage or sabotage. And destroying so many
flying things that are difficult to distinguish from birds would be no easy
task.

Who would pay? Individuals. Buy a node, let it fly often, charge it otherwise,
help create an open, uncensored communication network (such things are hardly
unprecedented).

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andrewingram
I, for one, welcome our new avioid overlords.

Seriously though, the elegance is just breathtaking, i'd love to get myself
one of those.

~~~
eggbrain
I know you were joking from your first line, and maybe I'm being too much of a
hardass, but please don't start saying memes in comments. Its the kind of
thing that I would expect on Reddit or Digg, but not here.

~~~
andrewingram
My apologies, I mistakenly thought my correct use of the 'oid' suffix would
allow me to bypass the normal aversion to such things.

