Design of insect-inspired flying robots and their potential applications

#STEM #engineering #computer

Insect- and hummingbird- inspired drones offer many advantages over conventional, rotor-based designs: they are safer thanks to their low weight and soft wings, the flapping wings offer higher tolerance to collisions, produce more pleasant, lower frequency sound and, last but not least, their resemblance to natural fliers makes them more appealing to most humans. These features make them a perfect fit for aerial robotic applications near humans and/or in cluttered environments. Despite our still limited understanding of the very complex flapping flight aerodynamics, we can already design hover-capable flapping wing drones that have sufficient flight endurance and payload capacity for first real-world applications. In this lecture, Dr. Karásek will talk about the design and performance of bioinspired drone platforms developed during his research at ULB Brussels and TU Delft as well as in his spinoff company Flapper Drones. In the last part, he will also discuss potential future applications for these lightweight and safe drones.