Feather-Equipped Drone Can Maneuver in High Winds like a Bird
After observing birds in flight, EPFL researchers had the idea of building an energy-efficient winged drone capable of changing its wingspan, flying at high speed, making sharp turns, and moving through tight spaces. By changing its geometry mid-flight, the research team's new drone meets all these criteria. The moving part is located on the outer wings and it works like a bird's quill feathers, which are the large feathers at the edge of the wing. The wing is composed mainly of composite materials in order to maximize strength while reducing overall weight.
Transcript
00:00:05 when you look at drones today essentially they are small helicopters or small airplanes and that means that they are designed to function and to fly in very precise condition they are optimized for those conditions when you look at Birds instead they are adaptive and they can change their shape so that they can fly in many different types of winds and they can display a lot of
00:00:26 agility which our drones do not have for this reason we have designed a new type of drone which has feathers on the wings and it can change the shape and is much more agile and can fly many different types of wind conditions the most important part is mostly to uh maximize the shape change of the of the wing and doing that with very lightweight and simple mechanisms
00:00:54 the artificial feather are composed by a layer of fiberglass which is covered by a very durable uh fabric of nylon and then there is a carbon fiber shaft to increase the strength of the wing it can actually uh uh fly very aggressively when the wings are fully deployed and when the wings are fully folded we get a platform that can uh uh withstand heavy winds one of the main challenge When
00:01:20 developing uh morphing Wings is that it's very hard to Ed conventional uh control surfaces uh on the wing but uh with this uh morphing strategy we can have a symmetric folding and then we can easily control the the role of the airplane during flight