Posts by: Charlie Schumacher

Festo’s SmartBird

Earlier in the semester, I wrote my first blog post on “A Robot that Flies like a Bird.” The post was inspired by a video I saw last summer. Within the video, the head of the team Markus Fischer introduced the world to the first ever robot that flies like a bird; or so we […]

The Seabreacher

So far in the course, we have primarily focused on scientists and engineers drawing inspiration from nature to better understand the concept of lift and hopefully master the skill of flight. We have operated under the assumption that the principles from most of the studies we have seen thus far can only be applied to […]

A Robot that Flies like a Bird

For centuries, man has been possessed by the desire to fly. Naturally, nearly every inventor drew inspiration from the flight of birds. Nearly all of the earliest designs for flying machines attempt to replicate a bird’s flapping wings. Unfortunately, replicating a bird’s flight is exceedingly more difficult than one might anticipate. In fact, the motion […]