CycloTech has completed its latest BlackBird summer flight tests after two years of development.
Engineers successfully tested new flight maneuvers and confirmed that the simulations closely match real-world flight behavior.
The results bring CycloTech’s six-CycloRotor technology closer to future highly maneuverable electric aircraft.
Strap an Action 6 to an FPV and guess how wild it takes off? From breaking through water to blasting into open air, every scene stays sharp thanks to its cold-resistant design — built to endure.
🎥: sebastian_schieren
A robot that swims underwater, then flies straight out of it! 🦢
Water is 1,000 times denser than air. Moving through one or the other normally means two completely different machines.
Around 100 bird species disagree. Loons, gulls, puffins and petrels dive after prey, then leap back into the sky.
Engineers at MIT and EPFL built a robot that does the same thing.
It's a flapping-wing aerial-aquatic vehicle, it weighs under 300 grams, and the results are out in Science. @RaphZufferey who runs the AURA Lab at MIT, is lead author.
A waterproof motor drives a crankshaft that pumps two flexible wings up and down at set frequencies, and a motorised tail changes angle to climb or dive.
The wing membranes are coated with hydrophobic nanoparticles so water sheds off them.
Wing flexibility turned out to be the whole game. Flexible enough to keep flapping amplitude low in water, firm enough to hold the robot up in air.
→ Swims at almost 1 m/s flapping at around 5 Hz
→ Flies at around 6 m/s at a similar frequency, close to real diving birds
→ The water-to-air transition needs a pitch of around 70°. Shallower and the wingtips catch the surface, steeper and it falls back in
My favourite finding is the one about feet. Puffins and ducks paddle at the surface to get airborne, so the team assumed a robot would need something equivalent.
It doesn't. Wings and tail alone are enough.
Funded in part by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship 🇵🇱
Read more here: https://t.co/vESzhkwOTl
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