Love the concept! Wish they showed the actual “bird” flying and not just 3D renders. That being said, I would love to see how they will overcome the power/battery issue, given they market it to be better than quad in terms of the flight time.
In theory ornithopters are more efficient that quadcopters, since you are moving more air (momentum) at a lower delta-v (energy). In practice a lot depends on the efficiency of the drive train.
Lift is caused by the change in momentum of the air deflected by the wing, and is proportional to the velocity, while the energy required to move the air is proportional to the square of the velocity. For a given amount of lift, a larger wing moves more air, but gives it a smaller change in velocity, so requires less energy.
i.e. large slow wings are more efficient than small, fast wings; large slow propellors are more efficient than small, fast propellors. Two large flapping wings are more efficient than four small, fast propellers.
I doubt one exists, or will anytime soon. People have literally been trying to build this sort of thing since the days of Leonardo^WIcarus, but power-to-weight ratio has always gotten in the way. Besides having hollow bones that weigh basically nothing, birds have a combination of fine motor control, proprioception, and power management that we don't even have good models for yet. We'll get there, of course, but not this month.
Would love to be proven wrong with an actual video, but there's nothing on the site but rendered animations. If they had something to show, they'd show it.
That's pretty cool, but I don't agree that it's in the same league as what's being sold here. They'll need to scale it up 10x and make it soar, glide, and turn, and climb and dive under power, without sounding like a steampunk automaton, and while still looking like an actual bird with articulated wings.
Power-to-weight is only an issue for human-powered ornithopters. Battery or internal combustion powered (and even rubber band powered) ornithopters work fine.
A company called Festo has been showing prototypes of biomimetic flying machines for many years now [1].
After a little more digging, they do have videos of prototypes in their 'news' section, it's odd that these are not easily findable via the home page: https://www.silentflyer.tech/testing-its-wings/
As others have said. These already exist in various forms. The problem for this company is that they have absolutely nothing. Meanwhile some other company builds these for advertising and hobbyists for fun.
> Flygildi has partnered with Purdue University to test the prototype Silent Flyer and is working closely with a range of other partners to bring even more cutting-edge tech to the UAV, including fellow Icelandic startup Nanom.
I have a friend who's deep into RC flight, and he says that current state-of-the-art in flapping models fly poorly. It seems like it would be easier to 1. Build something that looks like a bird soaring 2. Power it with either a ducted fan or a prop-on-top-of-the-wing design, either way so the prop wouldn’t be visible from the ground, but the wings don't have to (fully) flap -- maybe they move a little to give a life-like appearance.
Interesting idea. Land in the middle of a high tension line, extend a (not too long) antenna, and then capture the (high voltage but low current) leakage.
It's a bad sign for any company when they have headshots of the team on their webpage before any picture/video of the actual product (3d renders don't count).
In fact, I can't think of a single such company which ended up successful.
I was thinking the same thing- the web page lists four employees, two advisors, and two founders. Some of those may be duplicates, but they spent an awful lot of space on the people, and only brief parts of the video on the (computer rendered) product.
Maybe some investors will be interested in the names behind the company, but nobody in the police/surveillance market cares. They want to see how closely it looks/sounds like a real bird, how long the battery lasts, etc. I expect that savvy investors realize that too, and probably aren’t chomping at the bit to invest in a company that goes public without at least a prototype to show off.
Hummingbirds are actually a great counterexample, nice.
They might have to make it nuclear powered to attain 70 wing beats a second in a vessel light/small enough to sustain flight though.
But they’re probably high off the ground in a healthy flow of wind current right, as Newton’s third law would dictate. I could be wrong - mainly just nitpicking the way the demo video relentlessly mentions that the bird can hover
Surely the idea of building a drone based on a bird has crossed drone manufacturers mind, and given that no drones like this exist, I expect there to be technical hurdals to get it working. I see no mention of innovative technology, save the idea of building it in the shape of a bird, and a nice 3d render. Highly skeptical.
Definitely not. But just the intent to do something novel is not enough to innovate. The superficial impression I got of them is that their sole difference to competing drone manufacturers is the intent to build one in bird-shape, which I highly doubt is unique, and probably explored by more experienced engineers. The only way to build something that hasn't been built before is by using something novel, a material, manufacturing process, etc - something I don't see, which is why I'm sceptical. But open to be proven wrong of course.
I've always assumed it's because in order to do it successfully, you need either unicorn materials that don't exist or self-repairing (biological) materials. Birds preen their feathers to keep them in flying shape all day long - and regularly grow replacements.
Useless. Drones are not "seen" with cameras and then identified as drones. They are detected on radar, or by their control signals, and identified based on how they sound electronically. Making it look like a bird to the human eye as useful as it would seem.
If you want to fool a cassual observer, say a soldier glancing upwards occasionally, then shape it like a soaring hawk. But dont bother with flapping wings. Just use a transparent prop. About 1000 feet nobody will tell the difference.
> Drones are not "seen" with cameras and then identified as drones
Depends. Not every part of the Ukraine front has state of the art EWAR capabilities (on either side), and is infested with drones.
That said, it's still not that useful IMO simply because soldiers can't really notice normal quadrocopter drones when they're flying high anyway, or even if they can there's so many of them because they're so cheap that it doesn't matter if the drone doesn't make a return trip.
Agreed that bird-like-but-soaring would be a better fit -- I can't see flapping as needed at all
But most all of ukraine does have laptops and SDR dongles capable of sniffing out a drone that is transmitting footage back to controllers. Add a directional antenna and you can build a reasonable drone detector for a few hundred bucks.
I guess you could do a recon version that dumps footage once it gets back - no rel time feed but could be useful for cladestinly looking for more static things.
Still, its more likely faster flying screemer drones from hell will get even better to not make this thing useful.
Like, when I saw the Screamers movie from a rented VHS cassette many years ago, I would not think I would see it happen in reality- but even more deadly! Like sure, in the movie those killer robots were autonomous and self replicating.
But they still had just a tiny buzz saw & had to jump from the ground to gut soft targets like infantrymen.
They didn't fly at you at 200 km/h with a HEAT warhead that can kill a modern main battle tank by single well placed hit!
I believe the biggest application of this tech would be to freak out your adversaries and make them commit inordinate amounts of resources to scrutinise and track birds around their installations.
To do that you don’t even need a working drone, just presentations and flashy advertising.
Flying a transparent kite is not cheaper than not flying anything at all.
The other thing with a transparent kite (or any other physical thing) is that it is concrete. Your adversary looks at it, laughs and figures out 15 things to counter it. But if you succesfully hint the idea that you have a bird shaped drone in their mind without showing any example they will drive themselves mad by paranoia. Because then any bird can be a spy, and the fact that they haven’t found a single one yet is just further proof how stealthy these things are!
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadi.e. large slow wings are more efficient than small, fast wings; large slow propellors are more efficient than small, fast propellors. Two large flapping wings are more efficient than four small, fast propellers.
Would love to be proven wrong with an actual video, but there's nothing on the site but rendered animations. If they had something to show, they'd show it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vm-Yq6xiSk
The 3D renders don't look much more ambitious than this.
After a little more digging, they do have videos of prototypes in their 'news' section, it's odd that these are not easily findable via the home page: https://www.silentflyer.tech/testing-its-wings/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUE8o056Cpc
/s
In fact, I can't think of a single such company which ended up successful.
If it does pan out, Birds Aren't Real [1-3] could finally become reality.
[1] https://birdsarentreal.com/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Aren%27t_Real
[3] https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_mcindoe_birds_aren_t_real_ho...
Maybe some investors will be interested in the names behind the company, but nobody in the police/surveillance market cares. They want to see how closely it looks/sounds like a real bird, how long the battery lasts, etc. I expect that savvy investors realize that too, and probably aren’t chomping at the bit to invest in a company that goes public without at least a prototype to show off.
Other than that no I don't think I've seen a bird truly hover not upwind (i.e. static in 3 dimensions, not an artifact of parallax from me also moving
https://www.silentflyer.tech/press/
Someone always ends up being first to succeed, and until that point others look in that direction and decide to pursue safer paths.
This is not true. Here is a video of a bird-like drone:
https://youtu.be/kio6w3Xu3-w?si=W8h0eHe9gpP_NpQI
If you want to fool a cassual observer, say a soldier glancing upwards occasionally, then shape it like a soaring hawk. But dont bother with flapping wings. Just use a transparent prop. About 1000 feet nobody will tell the difference.
Depends. Not every part of the Ukraine front has state of the art EWAR capabilities (on either side), and is infested with drones.
That said, it's still not that useful IMO simply because soldiers can't really notice normal quadrocopter drones when they're flying high anyway, or even if they can there's so many of them because they're so cheap that it doesn't matter if the drone doesn't make a return trip.
Agreed that bird-like-but-soaring would be a better fit -- I can't see flapping as needed at all
Still, its more likely faster flying screemer drones from hell will get even better to not make this thing useful.
Like, when I saw the Screamers movie from a rented VHS cassette many years ago, I would not think I would see it happen in reality- but even more deadly! Like sure, in the movie those killer robots were autonomous and self replicating.
But they still had just a tiny buzz saw & had to jump from the ground to gut soft targets like infantrymen.
They didn't fly at you at 200 km/h with a HEAT warhead that can kill a modern main battle tank by single well placed hit!
To do that you don’t even need a working drone, just presentations and flashy advertising.
Flying a transparent kite is not cheaper than not flying anything at all.
The other thing with a transparent kite (or any other physical thing) is that it is concrete. Your adversary looks at it, laughs and figures out 15 things to counter it. But if you succesfully hint the idea that you have a bird shaped drone in their mind without showing any example they will drive themselves mad by paranoia. Because then any bird can be a spy, and the fact that they haven’t found a single one yet is just further proof how stealthy these things are!
Your constituents usually don't have radars
Nowadays we are at 'its so simple and cheap we can make toys' stage https://zing.store/collections/go-go-bird
One of the toys in flight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDihDrdPBqo