Dutch scientists have come up with a miniscule, remote-controlled, Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) known as the DelFly Micro fitted with a camera and image recognition software that much resembles the flight of an actual insect! DelFly Micro is the enhanced version of it’s predecessors DelFly I and DelFly II and weighs just 3 grams and measures 10 cm from it’s wingtip to wingtip. It operates on a battery weighing 1 gm, can fly for about 3 minutes and is able to attain a maximum speed of 5 m/s. The ‘ancestors’ of the current DelFly were ‘giants’ compared to it: DelFly I weighed 23 grams and 50 cm whereas the DelFly II weighed 16 grams and measured 30 cm.
Scientists, for a while, have been trying to mimic the flight of the insects which has a fundamental variation from the flight of the birds. Insects maneuver by vibrating their wings in the air — sometimes these vibrations measure as high as 800 strokes per second! Insects sort of ‘row’ their bodies into the air that allows them to possess excellent flight capabilities like hovering, reverse flying and instantaneous pace variation.
DelFly Micro, the latest ‘mechanized insect’ has been designed to capture images in rather inaccessible and impossible-to-reach terrains and altitudes. It propagates TV quality images via the camera fitted onto it’s head on the ground computer from which it’s also being controlled. Just take a look at the video!
Source: Physorg
