A Drone Designed Like a Bird

We think about bird flight as flapping wings, and plane flight as fixed wings and propellors or jets. But there is a lot more to bird flight than flapping wings. Birds take off by hopping into the air with their spring-loaded legs. A new drone project called RAVEN (Robotic Avian-inspired Vehicle for multiple ENvironments) combines the mechanics of birds and planes to give us a bird-inspired robotic drone, with vertical takeoff and landing. This video shows the amusing difficulty of such a takeoff. Real birds have to learn how to launch themselves, and so do robotic drones. Notice they haven't exactly mastered the vertical landing, but they'll get there. Read about the research that went into the birdlike takeoff in the journal Nature. (via Metafilter)