SoylentNews

Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

BBC [bbc.co.uk]:

Known as Skeeter, the secretive project has cracked the challenge of using flapping wings to power a drone. While wings are more efficient than a propeller and allow a dragonfly to hover in the face of strong gusts they are almost impossible for human engineers to emulate.
...
"Making devices with flapping wings is very, very hard" says Mr Caccia. Helicopters manoeuvre by changing the pitch of rotor blades to go forward and backward or to hover. For smaller objects hovering is a major challenge.

"A dragonfly is an awesome flyer" says Alex Caccia, "It's just insane how beautiful they are, nothing is left to chance in that design. It has very sophisticated flight control."

The dragonfly does have 300 million years of evolution on its side. Animal Dynamics has spent four years writing software that operates the hand-launched drone like an insect and allows it to hover in gusts of more than 20 knots (23mph or 37km/h). From 22 to 27 knots is classed as a "strong breeze".

The project worked beautifully until "due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog [goodreads.com].”

Original Submission