Ornithopter with morphing-coupled wingbeat pattern [video] | Hacker News Reader

Ornithopter with morphing-coupled wingbeat pattern [video]

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37 pointskbns11 comments

This is what I want to see. I get happy from it, it is progress in the right direction. Unlike Boston Dynamics videos which freak me out.

You don't see the CIA or the police using this?

A bird? They are already doing blanket signals intelligence. That ship has sailed.

I mean for assasinations. For police, low altitude surveillance is more valuable than high altitude drone or wide area camera on a sattelite.

I am not afraid of these birds. The ATLAS robots can be used to contain a whole population or destroy a country and win wars by mass killing.

Yeah, and yet again people think the problem is with the strong and powerful that develop this stuff instead of the weak and foolishly "peaceful". Imagine if every country had nukes and ICBMs, total peace. With robots like these (and other weapons) there might be initial carnage if you have the wrong leaders anywhere but then a natural equilibrum will soon be established that will allow for a very long lasting peace fueled by deterrence. Either you get slaughtered by bots so you don't fight or you both rely on bots so less people die and surrender happens sooner when one side's bots get decimated.

Either way, shit is going down. I assure you, china and others are building similar robots, building them is not a choice unless not defending yourself in your opinion is a choice. And like nukes, without a power equilibrum, one side dominates and the wrong side will use it for conquering. The way you make sure this stuff doesn't get abused is by getting the right people in office.

This is really interesting, but I'm curious about two things:

1. How power-efficient is this compared to a similar-sized quadcopter drone?

2. Is it possible to scale this up to the size of a small airplane (for 2-4 passengers) or even a large commercial airliner?

The paper is on arxiv:

“A Novel Actuation Strategy for an Agile Bio-inspired FWAV Performing a Morphing-coupled Wingbeat Pattern”

https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.02118

I wonder if this would make a more efficient/effective drone for warfare. Creepy thinking of AI bird drone loitering munitions.

This will just result in the extinction of endemic bird species in war zones, and after that be as effective as regular drones.

I remember reading a DARPA document from about a decade ago that proposed drones that could land on power lines and leach power. They proposed drones that changed shape to blend in with whatever technical widgets are already hanging off the power lines. While they were charging they could be used as stationary surveillance stations or nodes in a mesh network.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com