Pretty cool. Just two servos per wing, with one shared BLDC motor to provide the power to the strokes. That's comparable to what normal fixed wing drones have. Extreme mechanical complexity though.
I can't see this being practical, but it makes for one hell of a tech demo. Wish there was footage available. It feels really incomplete without a video of this bird taking off, flying and landing.
I used to be obsessed with rc ornithopters but I always thought the main problem was that hulking gear ratio/mechanism and the oscillation making it not really great for flight compared to fixed wing/propeller driven.
For the videos: search the page for "Movies S1 to S5" And click download to download a zip file of five videos. The fifth video shows the actual flight. Albeit, there's a string attached to the top, which doesn't appear to be helping it, but I'm not certain.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 30.1 ms ] threadhttps://youtu.be/tD5I6x_bPkw?si=KFTx89LmPjrVu5Ib
Edit - better video:
https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/video/2025/bird-like-robot-with-n...
I can't see this being practical, but it makes for one hell of a tech demo. Wish there was footage available. It feels really incomplete without a video of this bird taking off, flying and landing.
This one (servo driven) is really light compared to the usual RC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuOw6BUOo78
This guy does great work, it's like his obsession https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrB1pKInIu0
Also: https://www.amazon.com/Kooteyybhyy-Ornithopter-Generation-He...
Which may be re-branded version of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6nuMDV6n18
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Hanvon/page/426FE09E-17DC-4FBB...
I found this forum: https://www.rcgroups.com/ornithopters-101/
Which led to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWqBoA5CfPs - really neat to see it climb and glide.