COOL INVENTIONS

Cool Inventions

Smart Bird

This page features cool inventions on types of robots that fly - hummingbird military robots, nano robot copters, smart robot birds, and future robots.

Among the cool inventions imitating bird flight - the Smart Bird robot is most impressive. It takes off, lands and flies like a real bird.

It has a two-metre (6.5 ft) wingspan, a lightweight (450 gram) carbon-fiber skeleton and uses hybrid drive technology to simulate the flying characteristics of the Herring Gull.

The design imitates the construction and the motion of the wings during flight.

Birds have a down-stroke and a characteristic up-stroke of their wings, but they also twist to change angles for maneuverability and directional control.

The Smart Bird mimics this capability by using a flexible articulated torsion drive that allows the robot to autonomously twist for maximum flight efficiency - just like real birds.

This technical adaptation is quite an accomplishment in aerodynamic engineering. The project also provided innovated research into material construction and energy consumption efficiency.

Source: festo.com

Nano Hummingbird

Nanotechnology has created some cool inventions and this nano robot is one of them.

It was recently recognized by Time Magazine as one of the best inventions of 2011.

These types of robots are often funded as military robots for unmanned aerial vehicle research. The Nano Hummingbird was developed for the Nano Air Vehicle Program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The objective of this project was to model the flight characteristics of a hummingbird because of it's precision flying and hovering capabilities.

This robot flies in any direction, hovers, and can turn on it's own axis, which makes it ideal for entering and maneuvering within buildings.

It has a 6.5 inch (16.5 cm) wingspan, a flight speed of 11 mph (18 km/h) and a flight time of about 20 minutes.

The propulsion and control systems are embedded in the wings. It also carries a battery, transmitter and a color video camera. Amazingly, the whole thing weights less than a AA battery (19.5 grams).

Source: avinc.com/nano; darpa.mil

Blind Juggler

These blind robot jugglers, as seen in the video below, are cool inventions.

Imagine bouncing a ball on your head while walking around a room. Now imagine doing that blind folded.

That's exactly what this flying juggling robot does.

Developed at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control in Switzerland, the blind juggler bounces a ping-pong ball without seeing it.

The robot accomplishes this feat without using any sensors to track the ball. Instead the robot is designed to carry out a sequence of mathematical and logical calculations to predict what the ball will do after it is bounced.

These calculations allow the robot to move and strike the ball repetitively without using any visual or motion sensors.

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Source: idsc.ethz.ch