‘PigeonBot’ brings flying robots closer to real birds
2Reported today on TechCrunch
For the full article visit: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/16/pigeonbot-brings-flying-robots-closer-to-real-birds/
'PigeonBot' brings flying robots closer to real birds
Try as they might, even the most advanced roboticists on Earth struggle to recreate the effortless elegance and efficiency with which birds fly through the air. The "PigeonBot" from Stanford researchers takes a step toward changing that by investigating and demonstrating the unique qualities of feathered flight.
On a superficial level, PigeonBot looks a bit, shall we say, like a school project. But a lot of thought went into this rather haphazard-looking contraption. Turns out the way birds fly is really not very well understood, as the relationship between the dynamic wing shape and positions of individual feathers are super complex.
Mechanical engineering professor David Lentink challenged some of his graduate students to "dissect the biomechanics of the avian wing morphing mechanism and embody these insights in a morphing biohybrid robot that features real flight feathers," taking as their model the common pigeon - the resilience of which Lentink admires.
As he explains in an interview with the journal Science:
The first Ph.D.student, Amanda Stowers, analyzed the skeletal motion and determined we only needed to emulate the wrist and finger motion in our robot to actuate all 20 primary and 20 secondary flight feathers. The second student, Laura Matloff,uncovered how the feathers moved via a simple linear response to skeletal movement. The robotic insight here is that a bird wing is a gigantic underactuated system in which a bird doesn't have to constantly actuate each feather individually. Instead, all the feathers follow wrist and finger motion automatically via the elastic ligament that connects the feathers to the skeleton. It's an ingenious system that greatly simplifies feather