New
research breaks down the fundamentals required to smoothly go from perched to
airborne.
November
15, 2018
Ben
Parslew had a problem: His robots weren't very good at
jumping. Parslew, an aerospace engineering researcher and
lecturer at the University of Manchester, studies the mechanics of flight.
Along with his research team, he had turned to robots to better understand how
flying machines might be able to launch themselves into the sky like
birds. But while avians seem to effortlessly become airborne,
Parslew's robots, which were relatively simple constructions,
didn’t find it quite so easy. Some would flip over in the air
and land upside-down. Others remained stable in the air but jumped in the
wrong direction. And still others fell over before they got off the ground in
the first place.
Something
was clearly not working here. So Parslew and his team decided they needed
to back up and first study how exactly a bird launches itself into the
air. “That was kind of motivation for doing this study, to understand why
our robots are failing and why birds succeed with such apparent ease,” Parslew
says.
The study Parslew's team conducted was published
last month in the journal Open Science. Using computer analysis, the
researchers found that when birds take off, they simultaneously control
two motions: the direction they’re jumping in and the amount they rotate
(pitch) their body as they accelerate, Parslew says. Such coordination
allows them to remain balanced during launch.
No comments:
Post a Comment