The four-winged, tailless style of their creation, the DelFly Nimble, is novel but evidently effective. Their robot can go 7 meters per second, or about 15 MPH, hover in place or perform all kinds of extreme motions like dives and rolls smoothly. It’s no joke doing that using rotors with continuous thrust, let alone via coordinated wing movement. You can see it perform a few more capers
in the video here.
Perhaps most amazing is its range; the robot can travel for a kilometer on a single charge. That sort of spec is the kind that military R&D directors love to hear about.
But the DelFly Nimble is already producing interesting scientific data, as lead researcher Matěj Karásek explains:
In contrast to animal experiments, we were in full control of what was happening in the robot’s ‘brain.’ This allowed us to identify and describe a new passive aerodynamic mechanism that assists the flies, but possibly also other flying animals, in steering their direction throughout these rapid banked turns.
Development is continuing, and no doubt biologists and three-letter agencies have tendered letters of interest to the Dutch inventors.
