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SALT LAKE CITY — We humans are surprisingly good at traveling when off the ground: We have planes that can fly at five times the speed of sound and we've traveled all the way to the moon and back — at least if you believe NASA and Neil Armstrong.
One thing we haven't yet been able to do, though, is fly like a bird. All that flapping and flying involves some pretty complex mechanics and has been so-far unachievable. But researchers at the University of Maryland and the Army Research Laboratory have a had a breakthrough: A mechanical bird so realistic that actual birds either attack it or fly in formation with it.
"Our new robot, Robo Raven, is based on a fundamentally new design concept," said Dr. S.K Gupta, who helped design the bird with the help of graduate students. "It uses two programmable motors that can be synchronized electronically to coordinate motion between the wings."
That's something no one has done before. Back in 2007, Gupta was able to demonstrate a mechanical bird, but its wings were tied together in motion by their motor. With the help of 3D printing, clever computing and lightweight materials, the team was able to get the wings to act independently while still maintaining a manageable weight.
"We can now program any desired motion patterns for the wings," Guptasaid. "This allows us to try new in-flight aerobatics — like diving and rolling — that would have not been possible before, and brings us a big step closer to faithfully reproducing the way real birds fly."
Mimicking the way real birds fly is not the only reason to develop the birds, at least if you're a military contractor. There are any number of uses for a maneuverable, silent and small unmanned vehicle. Future designs that look much more like real birds could conceivably be used to spy, much like Jabberjays from the popular Hunger Games series.
"We were inspired by the capabilities of the bird much more than the anatomy of the bird," said John Gerdes, a mechanical engineer who began designing the Robo Raven in 2008 while working on a graduate degree at UM, speaking to military.com.
"Our approach was more bio-inspired than bio-mimetic. In some ways this simplifies the design because we can focus on functional aspects without necessarily adopting the same set of constraints that apply to animals."
Payload is the big limiting factor right now. Robo Raven weighs less than a soda can, but can't carry much more than itself. Future designs will be focused on increasing the payload.
