[QysnZWB4]

Go to link for cool videos of jumping flying robots.

Now then, this is the first time that I will post about this......have you seen the wings of birds? they are not in a straight line like those on a airplane and there is a reason for that..... I have made paragliders with wings up to two feet long (balsa wood) and with foils on the wings that will flutter as it moves around in the air...... the flying range that I got by doing this is of three times the range of a regular straight wing.....I am not a scientist therefore I can only say what I have done but not the why that it works.......like the wings of a bird I believe that it will disregard the tiny turbulance of air that will hold it back and only fly on the "good" air.
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EPFL Looks to Bats, Locusts for Jumping and Gliding Robots.

POSTED BY: Evan Ackerman / Tue, December 27, 2011

Gliding is a very efficient way for getting from point A to point B. Jumping is a very efficient way of getting into the air at point A, especially if there are a bunch of obstacles between point A and point B that it would be a good idea to be airborne to make it over. Grasshoppers have been doing this for, I dunno, probably like a hundred million years, and roboticists at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland, are starting to design their robots with the same kind of jumping talents and expandable wings as our orthopteran friends.

Here's what EPFL's jumpglider hybrid jumping and gliding robot looks like when it's just jumping and gliding and not trying to fold itself up:


The jumping part, and the crawling around on the ground part, is somewhat impaired by the bot's giant wings, which is why getting this whole folding thing figured out would be pretty cool. Here's the locust-inspired folding mechanism in action:


Locusts aren't the only creatures with wings that cleverly fold up. EPFL are also trying out a system based on bats:


There's also some super secret third bio-inspired design that I can't find any additional info on (yet!), so have fun imagining what other animals might be used as a basis from which to create a gliding robot. Like, you know, elephants. It's all in the ears, man.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/r...gliding-robots