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What future for tomorrow?
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INNOVATION – This somewhat strange drone has wings made of forty pigeon feathers. Inspired by nature, a discipline known as biomimicry, the researchers at Standford intend to revolutionize the way of making aircraft wings.
2020-01-20T10: 59: 33.689Z – The drafting of LCI (with AFP)
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Since Leonardo da Vinci and his famous flying machines, the inventors have been thinking about creating machines capable of flying as nimbly, quickly and gracefully as birds. This dream got a little closer to reality last week. American researchers from Stanford University, in California, have announced that they have carefully studied the wings of dead pigeons to create the “PigeonBot”, a kind of drone with wings made of forty pigeon feathers.
“Aerospace and materials engineers can now begin to rethink how to design and make wings and materials that transform as skillfully as birds do,” said David Lentink, professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford and author of two articles describing results of this study in journals Science and Science Robotics.
“Look at nature, this is where your future is”
“Look at nature, that’s where your future is”. This quote, attributed to Leonard de Vinci, has become the spearhead of a new discipline, biomimicry. As its name suggests, this science aims to draw inspiration from the world around us to find innovative solutions. All four-membered animals, including dinosaurs, come from an ancestor who had five fingers at the end of his limbs, which over time became hands, paws, fins or wings. Today’s birds, like pigeons, have kept three fingers. When studying their wings in a wind tunnel, the researchers noticed that their wrists and fingers made it possible to precisely control the position of their feathers and the wingspan of their wings.
During flight tests, the manipulation of the wrist and fingers triggered tight and precise turns, evidence according to the researchers that birds mainly use these fingers to navigate in flight. The teams also discovered how the birds adapt their wings in flight: the adjacent feathers can stick together with a micro-structure functioning like Velcro to make the journey more fluid. These feathers cling to each other when the wing expands and detach again when it contracts, making it more resistant to turbulence.
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Scientists have noticed that similar structures exist in many bird species, except for owls, which can thus fly more quietly. These Velcro-like structures, known as “lobate cilia”, could have a wide range of uses, from medical to aerospace. For David Lentink and his colleagues, this represents many sources of inspiration for future research.
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