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Ultra-Light Micro Air Vehicles
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thursday July 24, @07:57AM
from the eye-in-the-sky dept.
from the eye-in-the-sky dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Dutch engineers have built the third generation of the DelFly autonomous air vehicle. The DelFly Micro made its first public flight earlier today in Delft. This micro air vehicle weighs only 3 grams and has a wingspan of 10 centimeters. This very small remote-controlled aircraft carries a 0.4 gram camera. The DelFly Micro, which looks like a dragonfly, can fly for 3 minutes at a maximum speed of 5 meters/second. It could be used for observation flights in difficult-to-reach or dangerous areas."
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Paging Danny Dunn... (Score:3, Interesting)
Danny Dunn [wikipedia.org] to the white courtesy phone, please ...
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Re:Paging Danny Dunn... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's exactly what I was thinking! When I was 12, and I read Raymond Abrashkin's "Danny Dunn: Invisible Boy", I was mesmerized. And this mini UAV is essentially the plot device in the book, right down to the dragonfly appearance. Pretty good prediction for a book from the mid '70s.
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Video link: (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Video link: (Score:5, Informative)
There is an assortment of additional video links on this page
http://www.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.jsp?id=1468ded9-96cb-47dd-aed3-da0a70a34813&lang=en [tudelft.nl]
Its like they are catering for everyone, because each link has a different format.
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Re:Video link: (Score:5, Funny)
OK, they win. I was going to moan about the refresh on the camera being inadequate, the flight time being useless, and the inability to hover meaning that it has two modes: flying, and crashing.
But having seen in action? Must... own... tiny... whirring... affront to God. Must.
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Re:Video link: (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Video link: (Score:4, Funny)
You may also want to check if the reflective surface of bathroom tiles mess with its navigation or imaging in any way.
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I'll wait for the Fourth Generation (Score:5, Funny)
You'd still notice this in the girl's shower.
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Re:I'll wait for the Fourth Generation (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I'll wait for the Fourth Generation (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I'll wait for the Fourth Generation (Score:5, Funny)
I know this sounds incredible, but it's actually possible to be in a shower with a girl in person without the aid of technology.
If you're just naturally invisible? If you're both plumbers? C'mon, tell us how! Slashdot wants to know.
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Re:I'll wait for the Fourth Generation (Score:5, Funny)
I know this sounds incredible, but it's actually possible to be in a shower with a girl in person without the aid of technology.
You must be new here.
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Re:I'll wait for the Fourth Generation (Score:4, Funny)
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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3 minutes? (Score:4, Insightful)
3 minutes is not very useful. By the time you reach your destination and actually get some good images, you've run out of time to return and have effectively lost your MAV. If they are meant to be throw-away, this is not a design flaw.
From my experience as an RC pilot, the smaller the craft, the more difficult it is to control. I would be curious to see how they've overcome the twitchiness of a such light weight.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why a dragonfly? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think a really good example is this guy's plane [youtube.com], he made it to be as light as possible and had to make his own motor for it. I think they should make one the size of this 'dragonfly' but with a propeller like the plane in the video.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand why they're trying to shape it after a dragonfly- There are more efficient ways of getting around the air than flapping wings. I mean, yeah, I get that it would be cool to have one that actually looked like a dragonfly for spying and such, but for getting into dangerous or hard to reach places it shouldn't be designed this way.
Yeah, the millions of species of insect and bird have got a lot to learn from us land lubbers. I mean, hovering in one position is a piece of cake for our mechanical devices, so much so that we can get a flight to anywhere we want and we don't need a runway. Oh, wait, we can't unless we use a helicopter, which is slow in the horizontal plane and noisy and fuel hungry.
Living things manipulate the air in much more elegant and finely controlled ways than anything man has produced. We mainly just force our wa
great for urban warfare (Score:4, Interesting)
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Insectothopter? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Impossible! Slashdot SAID SO!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Does NO ONE ELSE remember THIS conversation:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/11/131214 [slashdot.org]
Scroll through it and take in all the posts about how all the eye witnesses were CRAZY to have reported seeing "Dragonfly-Sized Insect Spies". Bathe in the impossibility of the batteries, the cameras, the wireless technology. Soak up how it simply was not even close to being true.
One of a short list of things must be the case:
A) That story from October certainly WAS plausible and a lot of you pundits are going to be dining on fresh hat today.
B) All the know-it-all's are still correct, due to some technicality.
C) I have somehow swapped dimensions again and no one ever said it didn't happen at all...
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A Mathman Prophecy (Score:3, Insightful)
The DelFly Micro, which looks like a dragonfly, can fly for 3 minutes at a maximum speed of 5 meters/second. It could be used for observation flights in difficult-to-reach or dangerous areas
How can it do that, if it only flies for 3 minutes?
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Re:A Mathman Prophecy (Score:5, Insightful)
I would say 500 meters straight up and over the edge of that cliff you're standing at the bottom of would definitely fall under 'difficult-to-reach'. And quite possibly be extremely useful to have one person there checking that out before you bring in say that helicopter...
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Re:What happens... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:What happens... (Score:5, Funny)
In an issue of Meat & Poultry magazine, editors quoted from "Feathers," the publication of the California Poultry Industry Federation, telling the following story:
The US Federal Aviation Administration has a unique device for testing the strength of windshields on airplanes. The device is a gun that launches a dead chicken at a plane's windshield at approximately the speed the plane flies.
The theory is that if the windshield doesn't crack from the carcass impact, it'll survive a real collision with a bird during flight.
It seems the British were very interested in this and wanted to test a windshield on a brand new, speedy locomotive they're developing.
They borrowed FAA's chicken launcher, loaded the chicken and fired.
The ballistic chicken shattered the windshield, broke the engineer's chair and embedded itself in the back wall of the engine's cab. The British were stunned and asked the FAA to recheck the test to see if everything was done correctly.
The FAA reviewed the test thoroughly and had one recommendation:
"Use a thawed chicken."
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Re:Hello Gentle Denizens of Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
"Roland" is the submission whore that "blogs" (copies) stuff from all over, links to it, adds a simplistic comment then somehow gets that submitted to Slashdot.
He does it for ad revenue. Quite effective at it, and quite annoying for those great unwashed that don't suck Slashdot dick to get stories submitted.
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