Name: A robot that flies like a bird
Uploaded: 2011-07-22T14:26:05Z
Duration: 6 min 2 s
Description: Plenty of robots can fly -- but none can fly like a real bird. That is, until Markus Fischer and his team at Festo built SmartBird, a large, lightweight robot, modeled on a seagull, that flies by flapping its wings. A soaring demo fresh from TEDGlobal 2011.

Plenty of robots can fly -- but none can fly like a real bird. That is, until Markus Fischer and his team at Festo built SmartBird, a large, lightweight robot, modeled on a seagull, that flies by flapping its wings. A soaring demo fresh from TEDGlobal 2011.

A robot that flies like a bird

Humans have long dreamed of flying like birds, but imitating their effortless, agile flight remained a challenge. A lightweight robot modeled on the herring gull, with a two-meter wingspan and just 450 grams in weight, finally achieved this by flapping and twisting its wings for lift and propulsion. This breakthrough emerged from careful study of avian motion and precise engineering of carbon fiber structures. The result is a machine that not only soars overhead but does so with remarkable energy efficiency.