The German electric automation company Festo (remember? We followed it the first steps 4 years ago) has always pushed the development of “animal-like” robots to the maximum. In the past he has shown off robotic ants, kangaroos, penguins and more. Now the company's engineers have revealed the latest developments, fantastic-looking robot birds.
Each of the BionicSwift, the five robot birds developed by the Bionic Learning Network of Festo, has very respectable data. First of all, a wingspan of 68 cm, a body length of 44,5 cm and a weight of 42 g. Inside the body, Festo has crammed the wing movement mechanism and control components, radio and tracking technology. There is also space for a brushless electric motor, two servo motors, a battery and other small components.
How the BionicSwift flight works
For the imposing wings, the individual slats that constitute them are connected to carbon "feathers". These in turn are attached to the wing structure in a similar way to what can be found in real birds. When the wings lower, the slats close in a row to lift the robo-bird, but open wide on the way up to allow air to pass through. This allows you to reduce the effort to lift your wings. And all of this helps give BionicSwift a much better flight profile than previous robot bird models, according to Festo.
Each of the robotic birds has a radio indicator that sends GPS signals so that its exact position can be tracked by a computer that acts as a navigation system to set up pre-programmed routes.
This allows for precision flight that prevents robotic birds from colliding with each other or against anything else, and if a flight path is interrupted by things like wind or heat, birds are able to make autonomous corrections, even if the path in front is obscured by an obstacle.
As usual with Festo demonstrations, the engineers had a practical real-world application in mind when developing the prototypes, and in this case the aim was to demonstrate a camera-free indoor 3D navigation system that could find use in the automated factory of the future. Take a look at this video, it's worth it.
