This blog is related to History of a Ornithopter.
What is an Ornithopter? It’s a flying machine that works by flapping its wings. From the Greek words ornithos (bird) and pteron (wing), it was imagined as the most likely way for humans to fly by early inventors, including Leonardo Da Vinci.
From the 14th to 17th Centuries – that some of the scientific basics of aircraft design were explored beyond manpower and metal springs. As early as 1250, English philosopher and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon suggested that a type of flying balloon could be filled with “aether” and that an ornithopter – a mechanical “bird” – might one day be possible.
Leonardo da Vinci’s plans for his now-famous ornithopter were drawn up in 1488, but a model of this prototype “hang glider” with partially fixed wings failed to fly during a test flight in 1496. Another Leonardo prototype, a four-person screw-type helicopter, is today admired for its vision but not its science.
One of the first people to successfully build an unmanned ornithopter was a 19th century French engineer named Gustave Trouvé. He created his model of the unmanned ornithopter by implementing twelve gunpowder charges attached to the belly of the aircraft that would fire in succession allowing the wings to flap. The aircraft flew for only 70 meters, but Trouvé’s desgin proved to the scientific community that an unmanned ornithopter could be built.
Fast foward about 140 years from the time of Trouvé’s first launch of his ornithopter, and we now find that technology has allowed engineers to build ornithopters that actually look like the birds that original ornithopters were trying to mimic since the idea first came to life back in the days of the Renaissance and Leonardo da Vinci. A leading company in the field of automation called Festo, has developed a robotbird, that can take-off, fly, and land without any human interaction whatsoever. The robobird, which was insipired by the herring gull, or what we know as a sea gull, has tremendous agility and aerodynamics that allow it to move in the manner that a real bird would The design of the Smartbird is a huge step in the field of biomimicry because the bird is powered solely on a microchip processor that can scan its surrounding and environments to let the bird know where to fly. This type of automation is could one day possibly be used for military purposes or in search and rescue missions. The possibilities are endless.
