Studies In Ornithopters 223
weileong writes "This should be of especial interest to fans of Frank Herbert's Dune (or maybe only those who preferred House Atreides) - a genuine, flexible, flapping-capable winged aircraft (by which I don't mean passenger-carrying. Yet.) has been produced by the University of Toronto's Institute for Aerospace Studies and SRI International (Washington Post article, free reg required). Advantages include everything from low speed control to efficiency. Once these things really hit "real world" usage, the V-22 Osprey really HAS no reason to exist (and all the army personnel at risk of dying in one should rejoice)."
Ornithopters predate Dune (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars books?
Re:Ornithopters predate Dune (Score:5, Interesting)
But on Mars? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe they don't want to make it... (Score:4, Interesting)
Dare I say Avro Arrow [avroarrow.org]?
The Avro Arrow was a plane produced by Canada that was years ahead of its time. Unfortunately, because of the immense pressure from the U.S. (they didn't want Canada to sell the technology to other countries), the project got shut down.
Yes, there's a little more to it than that, but that's the basic jist.
Read more about the Avro Arrow and the politics behind it at wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
Frankenstien's method (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't someone already doing something like this with cockroaches? It seems to me that we should just use the heads of people and animals to pilot all of our transportation. Who wouldn't like Dale Earnhardt's head driving you to the store and to pick up the kids?
Oh. Nevermind.
V-22 Complexity (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the V-22 has had problems just because it is too complex.
You've got two jet-turbines, which can each power both rotors. So you've got a very complex power distribution system. Lots of stuff in those pods which rotate, so lots of flexible connections which can break.
I would have preferred to see a design with six or so smaller ducted fans. So even if you lose one on each side (due to small arms fire, for example) you still have enough power to maneuver and land safely. Two or three lost on one side would need ballistically deployed parachutes to land.
Hmph. I've just described a Moller skycar [moller.com]. The production version hasn't flown yet. But with relatively modest funding, I bet it could. Still got a complex computer control system, so who knows what bugs might lurk there.
Re:If submiter had bothered to read the article (Score:3, Interesting)
the body of any aircraft using this method will move up and down in synch with the wings. Hardly something you want in a long distance passenger aircraft!
It would probably redefine the whole airsickness experience!
Do you want to be shaken, not stirred? (Score:3, Interesting)
But whether ornithopers will ever carry humans in any quantity is doubtful because the ride will, to say the least, be sickeningly bumpy. The unsteady flows over the flapping wings mean cyclic forces on the fuselage and cyclic accelerations for the passengers. The ride will be much much worse than that of a helicopter and more like the ride in a small boat riding a very rough swell. Other flapping organism don't mind the vibration and cyclic motion of flight as they are evolved to tolerate it. In contrast the human propioception system will definitely hurl when subjected to the "graceful" up and down motion of a large-scale flapping machine.
Ornithopters will make really cool recon drones, whether over battlefields or Mars, but they will make horrible passenger vehicles
Re:Flight is one area NOT to copy nature in. (Score:3, Interesting)
Your proof is?
Wings may not be perfect, but they do a great job of some tasks - such as hovering - that fixed wing aircraft are lousy at.
If you read the article, it suggests small unmaned spy craft - where hovering is essential.
Re:Maybe they don't want to make it... (Score:2, Interesting)
That part that says that the US wanted to buy Arrows just to convince Canada to keep the program alive?
That part that says that the cancellation of the Arrow might not have harmed Canada's aerospace industry, as it is now the 3rd largest makers of aeroplanes (after the US and France)?
The part that says that spending money on the program was eating up a large and unsustainable portion of the government's spending?
Another note to add, not in that article (but available elsewhere on Wikipedia): the man who cancelled the program, Diefenbaker, won an election on the "Red Tory" platform of not bowing to US interests...
Here's another ornithopter (Score:3, Interesting)
And this one you can buy for less than $15.
Start with that, see how it works, then design your own, and you could start doing your own model designs, and work up from there.
Not exactly new... (Score:3, Interesting)
"Passenger carrying"? Did you read the article? (Score:5, Interesting)
These are small military machines. Their purpose is to enhance our ability to kill people that piss us off.
The martian exploration stuff is flim flam, because, as they themselves say, this is about the most inefficient way we could possible devise of flying about. Efficient flying animals hardly flap their wings at all. In contrast Hummingbirds drink eighty seven times their own weight in a cocktail of cocaine and Red Bull each day just to stay alive. And if you're not sure of my grasp of mathematics or biology there, consider that the alternative is believing someone who says "centuries of evolution have produced structures and systems that work very well".
Ornithopters are essentially cool-but-useless at the human scale. Yes, everyone said the Wright brothers were crazy too, but the thing is, the Wright brothers looked at ways of improving on the results of (literally hundreds of years of!) random evolution. Merely mimicking it just seems to produce a lot of problems, and fixing them appears to give a solution that's worse than what we already have.
Good luck to the people that get to play with these, but really, we should just stick to the much more credible miniature black helicopters [zapatopi.net].