A Robotic Drone That Takes to the Air Like a Bird

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's ...sort of both. We think about bird flight as flapping wings, and plane flight as fixed wings and propellors or jets. But there is a lot more to bird flight than flapping wings. Birds take off by hopping into the air with their spring-loaded legs. A new drone project called RAVEN (Robotic Avian-inspired Vehicle for multiple ENvironments) combines the mechanics of birds and planes to give us a bird-inspired robotic drone, with vertical takeoff and landing.

Getting a bird's takeoff right wasn't easy, as you'll see in this video. Real birds have to learn how to launch themselves, and so do robotic drones. Notice they haven't exactly mastered the vertical landing yet, but they'll get there. Read about the research that went into the birdlike takeoff in the journal Nature. Then when you see a bird in the air, keep in mind that it could be a raven or maybe a RAVEN. -via Metafilter