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.
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.
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.
If twisting wings were that advantageous for air travel, I would think they would've been adopted into a mainstream product by now, since it has been many years since the expiration of those patents.
There are a lot of designs that would be highly advantageous to aircraft design that aren't for one reason or another normally incorporated in new variants.
Canards come to mind right off the bat. The fact is that the design of aircraft is extremely expensive and there is little advantage to innovation. You aren't going to be able to charge twice as much as your competitor with the 737 lookalike regardless of how wonderful your new canard layout flexible control surface design is.
Even military aircraft aren't pushing the envelope in design features anymore - think of how similar an F-22 is to an F-15. There is simply too much risk and not enough payoff.
Canards have been used quite heavily in fighter jets for the last 20 years... Gripen, Typhoon, Rafale, Kfir. All delta-winged designs with the same basic layout.
For that specific example however I was thinking civilian aircraft, in which canards would be a huge step forward but are never seen.
Never as in "commercial success". Closer to reality than the 144, which was pretty much a government money pit, was the Beech Starship (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beechcraft_Starship). Again though, not able to see any real success.
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.