Flapping-wing robot achieves self-takeoff by adopting reconfigurable mechanisms

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0465

87•PaulHoule•4mo ago

Comments

mhb•3mo ago

The essential missing (or maybe I just missed it) video:

https://youtu.be/tD5I6x_bPkw?si=KFTx89LmPjrVu5Ib

Edit - better video:

https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/video/2025/bird-like-robot-with-n...

05•3mo ago

It's a render. A real life takeoff video is still missing..

yorwba•3mo ago

Movie S5 from the supplementary material: https://imgur.com/a/LVb2m22

05•3mo ago

Looks super cool. Now I want to build one and stick an FPV camera on it:)

orthecreedence•3mo ago

You can see the string attached to it! Do they think we're stupid??

yorwba•3mo ago

The string goes slack when it lifts off, so it's not like it's being pulled up. I think it's there to catch it in the inevitable case of a crash. And maybe they haven't figured out how to land gracefully yet.

monooso•3mo ago

I look forward to Boston Dynamics turning this into something that will haunt my nightmares.

bigjohnjacob•3mo ago

The birds aren't real people are gonna love this.

ACCount37•3mo ago

Pretty cool. Just two servos per wing, with one shared BLDC motor to provide the power to the strokes. That's comparable to what normal fixed wing drones have. Extreme mechanical complexity though.

I can't see this being practical, but it makes for one hell of a tech demo. Wish there was footage available. It feels really incomplete without a video of this bird taking off, flying and landing.

JKCalhoun•3mo ago

I saw recently the Chinese (The Chinese!) are experimenting in this area (and with flying insect machines?) — perhaps for surveillance drones that will look for all practical purposes like an ordinary bird/insect.

ACCount37•3mo ago

The whole "surveillance drone" thing is so overrated. No one gives a shit, really.

People make things like insect drones and bird drones because they're cool. That's it. That's the only practical purpose. Anything else is flimsy justification, sometimes employed to get the funding to do the cool thing.

ge96•3mo ago

I used to be obsessed with rc ornithopters but I always thought the main problem was that hulking gear ratio/mechanism and the oscillation making it not really great for flight compared to fixed wing/propeller driven.

This one (servo driven) is really light compared to the usual RC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuOw6BUOo78

This guy does great work, it's like his obsession https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrB1pKInIu0

PaulHoule•3mo ago

I had a really stylish robot dragonfly that I got from Big Lots at a huge discount, trouble was it could not fly in any amount of wind and the only place I could fly it was in Barton Hall.

ge96•3mo ago

I might know the one you're talking about, did it have a fan as a rudder?

Oh speaking of dragonfly-like ornithopter this one is hardcore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCrS52sM3Zs

Reminds me of that Chicken Run movie ha

PaulHoule•3mo ago

It was this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlyTech_Dragonfly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7j6KPbn4eE

JKCalhoun•3mo ago

Yeah, totally subscribed to "that guy". I think he's been experimenting with ducted fans (kind of not ornithopters) and also dragon-fly type of flight with four wings (entomopter?).

asdff•3mo ago

Advanced bird drones must be born secret technology. It makes little sense how so much can be understood about birds and yet there is no perfect bird replica on the market aside from these pared down maker lab tier efforts.

And indeed, lending further credence to the born secret idea is that the CIA has been experimenting on bird drones since at least the 1960s (1), and this was only revealed to the public in 2013. The state of the art must be so far advanced. What a prize for an intelligence agency to be able to create a surveillance system where it does not matter if it is detected on radar, or visualized at all because it looks exactly like indigenous bird populations.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_AQUILINE

TYPE_FASTER•3mo ago

Of course there is one available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/live/video/0a7d56413360489dbf25611edf...

Also: https://www.amazon.com/Kooteyybhyy-Ornithopter-Generation-He...

Which may be re-branded version of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6nuMDV6n18

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Hanvon/page/426FE09E-17DC-4FBB...

I found this forum: https://www.rcgroups.com/ornithopters-101/

Which led to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWqBoA5CfPs - really neat to see it climb and glide.

fijiaarone•3mo ago

Robots aren’t real.

jacquesm•3mo ago

What an amazing quality article.

ElijahLynn•3mo ago

Truth, so much detail and depth.

ElijahLynn•3mo ago

For the videos: search the page for "Movies S1 to S5" And click download to download a zip file of five videos. The fifth video shows the actual flight. Albeit, there's a string attached to the top, which doesn't appear to be helping it, but I'm not certain.

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