Bionic Swift
Written by Lucy Black   
Sunday, 05 July 2020

Festo builds some amazing things and it has just released information on its new Bionic Swift, which has to be seen to be believed.

Festo is an automation company based in Esslingen, Germany, and it really only builds bionic robots to demonstrate how good it is at automation - but it really should think about forming a robot company. Over the years they have produced some amazing devices and the latest, the Bionic Swift is perhaps the most graceful of the lot. Each bird weighs just 42 grams and, as you can see from the video, they amost fly without effort and there's a flock of them.

bionicswift2

The use of artifical feathers allows the device to fly like a real bird. The feathers pivot open on the up stroke to allow the air to pass through and then close on the down stroke providing the thrust to lift the bird.

 

You can see from the video that complicated flight manouvers are possible - just like a real bird. All of this from just one motor and two servos. Navigation is by way of high accuracy indoor GPS. The birds are controlled by a central computer that knows their position and can make flight course corrections in real time.

The reason Festo gives for building the bird is:

"The intelligent networking of flight objects and GPS routing makes for a 3D navigation system that could be used in the networked factory of the future. The precise localisation of the flow of materials and goods could, for example, improve process sequences and foresee bottlenecks. Moreover, autonomous flying robots could be used to transport materials, for instance, and thus optimise the use of space within a factory with their flight corridors."

Perhaps, but my guess is that they just wanted to build it...

bionicswift

More Information

BionicSwift

Related Articles

How Festo Built a Bird       

Is It A bird? No It's A Festo Robot       

Festo's BionicSoftArm and Hand

Festo's Flying Fox And Spider Robots Are Worth Seeing

Festo's Ants And Butterflies

Festo's BionicKangaroo       

Festo's Dragonfly

Hands That Learn To Hold

 

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

 

Banner


CouchDB 3.4 Strengthens Password Hashes
03/10/2024

CouchDB 3.41 has been released with stronger password hashes, a Lucene-based full text search implementation, and QuickJS as a JavaScript option.



Ilya Sutskever Raise $1 Billion To Research Safe AI
11/09/2024

Safe Superintelligence, the company co-founded by Ilya Sutskever after he resigned from Open AI, has raised $1billion in cash funding, despite the fact that it intends not to release any products [ ... ]


More News

kotlin book

 

Comments




or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info

Last Updated ( Sunday, 04 April 2021 )