Are Drones That Flap Their Wings Better? 

the shots of the owl flying through the helium bubbles was sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo cool

You're the last person I'd expect to make a Skyrim joke. Good job catching me off guard

I'm really fascinated by the blend of biology and technology you present here in your bionic bird drone. It certainly gives fresh perspective on flight and the ways we can learn from nature's engineering marvels.

You did the "birds are CIA listening devices" thing...😂...respect

I desperately need me one of those, this looks so fun

I love how you describe the drone "majestic" with that background that most of the viewers (like me) will never experience in real life!

Yo, that opening was LEGENDARY! I laughed so hard 😂

It was an extremely interesting video. I must agree, the bionic bird is truly majestic. hope to see future drones implement tail lift mechanisms in to design considerations.

One cool thing about bird flight (or at least undulating flight) is that rather than just moving their wings directly up and down, they create more of a figure-8 pattern to reduce drag on their upstroke.

Everything we try to do with technology, from medicine to engineering to softwares, is just trying to replicate something found in nature.

This is his best video yet!!!

Definitely one of the best science channels!!!

Great video! didn't expect the skyrim joke lol but i'm not surprised.

a dragon-fly version of this would be realy awesome to work with !

Most large aircraft tailplanes not only don't provide lift, they are actually designed to produce a downward force, and you just manipulate how much downward force it is creating.

FESTO has some impressive wing flapping drones, like a seagull, butterflies and a flying fox

if only the technology can be open source that huge innovation will be made in this field

well played Todd, well played

BIRD?! That looks more like a dragonfly or something. Lol

The owl flight footage from the Royal Veterinary College is very aesthetic! The vortices remind me of the Fluid Dynamics video by @PhysicsGirl and @3b1b.

That’s a steampunk mechanical bird right there

I wonder how long the battery lasts

That intro was something else, literally.

As someone who has chronic severe muscle spasms I always wonder if various animals get muscle cramps/spasms. Imagine mid flight your wing cramps up.

A bird in level flight is akin to PWM. Cool.

Show us how to make an object look like a living creature, like a beetle or spider. I think I've an idea of how it's perceived to be done but say we could make something appear as a triceratops, that'd be cool, then could be profitable just like the Internet upon introduction and introduction again! Very cool birdbot, thank you for sharing.

Depends on how fast you want to go, but people got another option - hide wings and use different trust then. Wings will be important in urban environment, since all you need is thin foil and power of air/wind to generate trust without too much noise that hi speed engines do, if we fly in the near future, it may be perfect way for quiet take off. Basically major problem for why there are no flying cars is this - noisy and hard take off. First will come EV drones with many propellers(less noise than few), if those propellers are quiet enough it may not come tho.

Attach some strings on the tail. It will look beautiful

He usually confuses me when he says bird😂

Ornithopters look so frickin cool .

Those mountains are cray cray.

the ornithopter wings are more like an insects than a birds, because a bird has an 'elbow' and most of the secondary feathers are on the fore-arm equivalent and the main primary feathers from the hand/finger equivalent, while the insect like uses only a shoulder really.

My snakes and im sure others' cats would freak out for that thing lol. Also hummingbird uses its tail feathers more actively in a dolphin-tail motion.

That intro deserves an award

I liked the thrust / scale experiment. Mythbusters have some explaining to do.

This is the best one ever.

Yes. Period. Ornithopters are *amazing* *Edit* Ever over-winde a rubber band one, than BLAM.

You are a genius, dear❤❤ And I fall in love with the locatio that you live❤

still a miracle we managed to catch up to millions of years of evolution in less than 100 years, and it's only going to get better

Wow! That is so cool, it really does work. Jimmy Joe, you’re a genius, with the help of your parents. That’s a cute bird, too. Very interesting video.

Crazy to see my home town in a video 🙂

Living the safest way possible.

The vortex the mechanical bird uses to fly is between its wings ABOVE its body. The down stroke of the wings produces a vortex with the small end facing up and forward. Everything going on under the wings is for steering.

YAY! Skyrim 😂 Fascinating flying bird. I want one!

Even if flapping planes were possible, I don't think they would ever take off (ba-dum-tss) commercially. The motion would be sickening to the passengers. Birds do just fine because they're the ones controlling all the movements. It's like driving a car while making lots of sudden movements. If you're driving, you're fine because you're the one controlling the movements and can pre-emptively shift your body to counteract the forces, whereas everyone else in the car will get thrown around.

Okay, so now we're starting to make Eintagsfliege. Welp, gotta get ready for a war against AI soon

Needs to use that refractive film for more shiny.

The creators have made everything perfect. Our technology is mimicry of everything.

That was awesome! Had a good old lough

Thank you. Now I can tell the difference between an airplane and a bird.

Really cool, i liked the old video from a drone

Haha the "birds aren't real" reference

Awesome video😀

If you’ve ever had a wow wee dragonfly, your childhood was awesome haha. I had one until it flew into the neighbors yard and the dog took it away 😢

I'm not kidding one of the images the ai Alice made in response to pictures of my pigeons was this scary looking cyber bird

Bro had us with his skyrim intro

I had a flapping wing remote controlled bat about 15 years ago.

you sir, are an innovator!

very birdlike

What kind of motor can flap wings like that?

When you have an glider aircraft and you would increase the weight of the aircraft then the aircraft would fly faster to create a larger lift at the same angle of descent. If you would do the same with a bird it would fly slower with increasing weight.

majestic it is

Finally. Proof!

You just wait till the Houthis learn from this concept...

Nature is awesome 👏

What would happen if tiny "wings" or "fins" covered the top of an airfoil? Or even an eel-like surface that accelerates the air over the wing surface? It would be insane to watch a plane with no obvious propulsion start to roll forward and then lift off.

Now if only we could get pterosaur drones to fly since pterosaurs aren’t exactly around to tell us how they fly

What city are you in? Its really beautiful backdrop

Action Lab: Bird. My Eyes: Bug.

I think the big breakthrough that aircraft engineers came up with was that they needed to produce multiple specialized air foils to do all that a bird can accomplish with its flexible organic wings. They couldn't design a mobile flapping structure that was sturdy enough to stand up to all the various forces it would endure, so they split it up between a fixed solid wing to hold most of the weight, smaller wings that could be manipulated to steer, and a third set that could provide thrust by spinning in a vertical circle instead of trying to reciprocate.

It's an Ornithopter

Another big thing to realise about birds is a lot of the body movement is also to keep the head stable - I've never properly researched it but I reckon that stability is key in the brain being able to process the environment and to make adjustments for controlled flight. Even when pigeons walk, their head stays stationary, their body moves forward leaving the head beyjnd, then the head snaps forward and locks in place ahead of the body again as the body steps forward. The hummingbird clip shows this fascinating behaviour really nicely.

Most large aircraft tailplanes not only don't provide lift, they are actually designed to produce a downward force, and you just manipulate how much downward force it is creating.

This video was actually sponsored by government birds

The memes, the bird videos, the robot, everything was perfect in this video

he lives at an awesome place for sure

1:22 "It gives a feeling you are watching a real bird fly" * Calm music * * Free falling to its demise*

You can see the snow covered peaks in the background!

In the canard wing configuration, the horizontal stabilizer contributes to lift as well making for a very efficient airframe design. In the more common wing configuration, the horizontal stabilizer is located near the rear and acts as an inverted wing actually reducing lift in exchange for flight stability.

I can't wait to see a drone modeled after a peregrine falcon that can dive at 240 MPH.

dragonflys from dune would go so hard

Wow this is one of the few products I’ve seen on this channel that is legitimately incredible.

This is pretty cool! Back in the 70’s I had a wind up flappy yellow bird. It was lightweight plastic and made by a French toy company. It was quite simple by comparison, and had no radio control. It was a simple line of flight toy. This… this is by far a vast improvement!

The view of the mountains from that park is beautiful

The weight on a bird's tail is in lieu of a vertical stabilizer. If the bird rolls the tail to the right, the bird yaws to the left. If there was no air pressure on the tail then it would provide only horizontal flight stability but not yaw stability. Most of the forward thrust of a bird, particularly larger birds such as hawk and eagle, is in the wrist and primary feathers. The secondaries attached to the arms provide some lift but little or no thrust. Basically the bird *swims* through the air scooping air with its hands then closing the fist and rapidly moving hands forward then opening again. This power cycle is long and deliberate, the recovery stroke is quick. This maintains a reasonably high duty cycle of providing thrust. Slotted primary feathers allow less resistance to air flowing between feathers on the upstroke.

that was DEFINITELY not expected

Things I didn’t know I needed.

Random Trivia: In mine language words for flight, bird, and aeroplane are all connected to oneanother (same stem): * flight - lend / lendama * aeroplane - lennuk * bird - lind * ornithopter - linnuk (in earlier meaning, in the folk epic, this is name of mythological ship)

That intro!!!!

Wow, what a vivid memory you’ve brought back for me. As a kid having watched A Bug’s Life and the scene where they build a “bird plane”, I’ve wondered why we haven’t made planes that fly like birds.

Last person I expected to see was Ralof. 😂

I love the stock footage of a woman feeding a single french fry to a flock of gulls

i love the part at @1:22 its like a batman shot with out the moon but with the moutains u can see thru the bird it matches the motutains then he dives

That Skyrim reference tho 😂

the "Oh no I know too much" got me 😆

It's a simple secret noone realizes: It you make a drone GLIDE, like a plane, it will save energy wasted on propelling it's blades. Simple, but EFFECTIVE

It WOULD potentially be a better way to do it IF the flapping wings flapped in such a way, (with a slight rotation and progressive angling), that creates the vorteces (vortexes) that REAL bird's wings create, therefore creating their lift and control... But we haven't quite been able to fully notice, understand, and copy that truly fluid air motion just yet... Because just simply flapping wings straight up and down definitely doesn't create the true vortexes that are needed for lift and control... Flapping wings ONLY in a straight up and down motion just creates major turbulence around them, which of course cancels out any potential for lift... The very subtle and truly intricate ways that a REAL bird, (such as a hummingbird or maybe a dragonfly especially!), flaps its wings to create the extreme amounts of lift and precise control they have is definitely something that really SHOULD be VERY closely studied and further developed into the future though, and hopefully it WILL be, because if we can actually ever copy what real birds, etc. do into our own aircraft, even if it's only limited to smaller drones and such, (because of the physics of sheer physical size, mass, and inertia limitations), then we could have a MUCH more efficient and effective way of flying (our (smaller) machines)!

Ya Super. About 50 years ago My Pop's sported me the flying pigeon? Thing at the Kite Shop in long Beach Washington . Wind up band and flapping wings . Flew fine but not sturdy for a 9 year old. I still remember dad bitching about 11 dollars and 35 cents... I understand now.

Bro where is this man those mountains in the background look beautiful

Well in the Flintstones they use Pterodactyl as airplanes.