Winged Robots Hint at the Origins of Flight
This might have implications further down the line for those of us in the small and micro UAS world, full article
By John Bohannon, ScienceNOW
Here’s what we know about the evolution of flight: By about 150 million years ago, the forests were filled with flying—or perhaps just gliding—dinosaurs like Archaeopteryx, possibly similar to the ancestor of modern birds. What we don’t know is what primitive wings were used for before bird ancestors could fly. A study published today in the journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics provides some fresh data for this debate, not from fossils but a winged robot.
There are two main theories for how avian flight evolved. According to the “trees-down” theory, primitive wings were used to glide down from heights. The “ground-up” theory holds that bird ancestors used their wings to “run flap” along the ground, making them faster and better able to scamper up steep inclines that got in their way. The problem with the ground-up theory is the huge speed required to achieve liftoff. By comparison, incremental improvements in gliding could have led to flight. The fossil evidence has been too scant to settle the matter.
The team ran DASH+Wings through a series of mini-Olympic events. The bot ran as fast as possible across the floor. It tried to clamber up increasingly steep ramps. And it also jumped from a platform to glide as far as possible from the base. For each of these events, the team compared the bot’s performance both with and without wings, and with its wings flapping or still, all while measuring performance with accelerometers and cameras.