Nano Hummingbird - A bird or drone?

Drones are being developed around the world, but few need to shed their characteristic of being a human developed thing and has to blend into the environment as a natural entity. The Nano humming bird is either a Ornithopter design or a twin rotor model which typically appears as a humming bird but really it is a mechanically operating Nano Aerial Vehicle. 

Video Credits: Nature on PBS

It is traditionally utilised for military purposes i.e.spying. But why not it be used to spy the mystically beautiful nature? This is a rotor based design, there are other authentic designs which use the same methodology as birds do, it is called... ornithopter. It generates lift by flapping its wings. The nano hummingbird is the most unusual. It's called an ornithopter and what that means, that comes from ornithology, the study of birds, real birds. And that means flapping wings, so it's a mechanical flapping wing, flying machine. 

So part of the idea was, not only to make it look like a real bird, but to investigate how flapping wing flight could perform compared to helicopters, compared to fixed wing airplanes. They picked the humming bird because it was about the right size and it had the right type of flying characteristics.

So it could fly forward, backward, up, down, rotate, it can hover, it can fly fast. They had to design and test about three hundred different wings to come up right finals design. Some had rubber in them, some had nylon, cloth, fabric, plastics, and different shapes. So these were inspired by both biological systems, they're kind of like the way feathers lay out in a hummingbird. 

In a real hummingbird wing and they're also inspired by model aircraft that use flapping wings. And then, also, sailboats and windsurfing sails. So if you turn these, like this, all of a sudden they start looking like sails. All of these variations affect how much thrust the wing makes, how noisy the wing is, how well it can be controlled and how much power it takes to flap and how durable it is.

Video Credits: Technovation

Real hummingbirds need to, basically, eat constantly. For every second that they're flying, they need to be eating and they spend, basically, all their time perched in a tree or they're flying to a flower and eating. They're not playing around, they're not goofing. 

They're not doing stunts and aerobatics, because for every flap of that wing, it takes a lot of energy out of their body. We have the same problem, where, this takes a lot of power and energy to fly and that was a big goal from day one, is we had to prove this could fly for several minutes. Helicopters are actually more efficient than flapping aircraft.

The helicopter rotor takes a lot of power at first to get moving, but then once it is spinning, it requires much less power. The flapping aircraft, also called the ornithopter, requires a lot of power to reverse the direction of the wing at the start and stop of each flap. And uses, overall, more energy than the helicopter. 

The most satisfying parts, are when you get each little piece working along the way. And then you start putting together and that's satisfying and it just builds and it builds and builds.

Nature on P