It Flies: Da Vinci's Dream Comes True | Hacker News Reader

It Flies: Da Vinci's Dream Comes True

npr.org

198 pointsrichardofyork50 comments

Open articleView on HN

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

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...

Proof that having a good HN headline matters!

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...

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.

Do you think DoD did not think about it previously while they put transmitters on birds? I think it has to do with autonomy, speed (a real bird is more energy efficient, is more powerful and has a longer flight autonomy), and electronic signals betraying you (you have to physically come back with the data, not upload/transmit).

It's one thing to carry out experiments that might one day be used on a battlefield. Such pie in the sky thinking is pretty constant.

It's completely another to adapt a working prototype into a viable device, and as far as I know nothing to date has come as close as that video I just witnessed.

In addition, secure two-way data feeds in real time is pretty much a solved problem, and is currently being used on pretty much every UAV in existence today.

Actually DARPA has funded a number of small UAVs with bird like properties. The Aerovironment humming bird [1] is one such example.

If you want to see some some overhype check out the video in [2]. Basically it has a the humming bird types everywhere. I suggested to a friend who shared that video with me that perhaps the military would add 'skeet shooting' to their rifeman training so that some members of your squad are designated MAV suppression :-)

Its wonderful robotics, I'm not sure its so great for folks who care about the civil liberty aspects, or the folks who have to worry about a larger threat surface.

[1] http://www.avinc.com/nano

[2] http://video.designworldonline.com/video/vid=0f7d1e1689b1472...

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.

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?]

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.

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.

In his latest book "zero history", William Gibson writes extensively about the festo as an urban espionage and tracking device, quite Brilliant.

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.

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.

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 :)

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

Don't be harshing his buzz.

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

To be fair, OP was talking about the future.

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.

I am not sure if anyone said that we will disapprove past science. The point here, like with everything we aspire for as programmers and scientists, is to improve what we have. Who knows what the future holds, I don’t.

Incidentally, many theories have been disproved and proved in Physics. And scientists will never rest; they will continue to re-invent, to invent, and to improve on what we have today. That is the simple point, to improve and see where it takes us.

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.

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.

> 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 ;)

Perhaps, but you are comparing Jupiters to raisins.

Interesting. I was just pulling a random counter explanation out of my derriere, but of course it has been already thought of before.

> 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.

That might work, but if we accelerate at the same rate we'd arrive at our destination looking much like sample from a centrifuge.

Hang-glider? It’s not powered so you need knowledge of thermals, but it’s basically what you want.

Or even paragliding (which is easier and cheaper). You’re sitting down so facing forwards rather than down, but it’s a beautiful way of seeing things from a new angle.

Yeah, I agree that those are close, but having full control over flying at varying speeds, landing with ease, taking off from anywhere, and going anywhere, is what we are really after.

If you want to take off, you need power. Look at a largish bird taking off, and then factor in the power/weight of the human body... you'll need to haul some ass.

VTOL? Sounds like you need a jet pack :)

The making of the bird:

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

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

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.

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 come to mind right off the bat.

Even military aircraft aren't pushing the envelope in design features anymore

Ever seen the JAS39 Gripen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gripen)?

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.

You are practically correct about that last thing, though I must point out that never is too strong a word: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-144

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.

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

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.

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.

I am sorry you think that way. I think it is beautiful to be able to do what life has done.

Nature has had billions of years to perfect her design, and we've only been trying for a few hundred years. I'd say that is pretty good considering.

There is without a doubt beauty in problem solving and engineering. I guess I think the article doesn't stress how far we have yet to go.

Festo's SmartBird website proclaims: "With SmartBird, Festo has succeeded in deciphering the flight of birds – one of the oldest dreams of humankind." That's just sales talk. It's not true. The gull still flies better than SmartBird does.

I stand by my point that "SmartBird" is neither smart (compared to a bird), nor a bird.

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.

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?

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).

I, for one, welcome our new avioid overlords.

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

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com