Friday Fun Flights #11! Our Weekly Summary of the Weird, the Whacky, and the Wonderful Things with The Drones Up There!

For some reason, this week’s theme is biomimicry!

Wikipedia defines that as “the imitation of the models, systems, and elements of nature for the purpose of solving complex human problems.” In other words, how can we achieve innovative thinking in the development of new ideas and concepts by mimicking nature.

And we certainly saw a lot of that type of thinking cross our newsfeed this morning through our automated and advanced drone news tracking system

For example, consider this drone design inspired by the flight and structure of the typical mosquito:

Or this mantra-ray inspired drone:

This is a very real trend – consider that just this week, Science, an official peer-reviewed publication, accepted a research paper on this trend:

Why is there such a focus on bio-mimicry in the drone field? The challenges with drones are real – longevity in the air is an issue due to battery weight, and flight paths often need to be flexible to deal with various environmental conditions. aka wind.

Given that, researchers and drone companies are constantly looking for new ways to deal with those challenges – and what better way to do that than to study what their natural counterparts are doing!

Not to mention that the research might help to deal with the issue of image stabilization in flight. Hence, some research at Stanford University involving swans and drones.

What can this type of research lead to? Watch this remarkable video of ThereCraft, a drone with a remarkable opportunitstic flight pattern for package delivery.

Watch the video carefully – you’ll notice it doesn’t actually touch the ground but carefully places the packages…

In this case, the design doesn’t involve biomimicry concepts, but actually upon early research jets by the US military and NASA. The article on the research is a really good read – the design will include transportation of goods up to 1,300kg!

What about controlling flight? Well, why not let simple muscle movements control it! That’s the research underway at MIT:

We could go on, but won’t, other than to say that this type of research has some ‘natural’ possibilities. LOL!

Onwards!

Back to our theme of ‘biology.’. We’re pretty certain that you’ve seen many pictures and video related to how wildlife continues to take over various parts of the world with the absence of humans due to the lockdown. It is a real trend.

And so with that, we’ll close this week with – sheep!

There is no drone connection, really, other than that the fact this wonderful video was filmed by a drone overhead. You really need to see the video – here!

Stay safe everyone, and have a great week!