This is indeed an interesting subject. Since David with his sling, humankind has been fascinated with Action at a Distance. Makes perfect sense to me. I see no moral distinction between removing an evil person with ground boots, artillery, manned or unmanned air strikes. But huge convenience and safety in the last. I wish, apropos the appropriate treatment of Bin Laden, someone had invoked that ancient prayer: "Deliver us from Evil". Wasn't there a cat, name of Jesus, actually said we should pray for that. He was a pretty good guy, in spite of some of his current followers here.
In my latter days at AeroVironment (AV) we became interested in ornifloppers, starting with the Quetzalcoatlus Northropi, now in the Smithsonian. It flew f'n feebly. Authentic, perhaps! At the time I thought a basic, fundamental, theoretical study would be needed to start design. It's a hellish tricky business: unsteady, large amplitude, separated, viscous, vortical flow. Ask any birdy! I proposed first we'd try to solve the simplest case, "steady" level flight, and go from there, followed by designed envelope-pushing flight test, a la grown-up aircraft. It's impossible to do correctly on computers, anyhow. As usual, I was completely wrong, and freely admitted it, unlike some Friamers!
Discussed this at length with Paul MacCready, and we decided, "Baby birds, fledgelings, they dunno flight theory or control circuits; they jus' flaps around, learning as they flop along". So Machine Learning was tried. Worked beautifully
The latest AV UAV, Hummingbird, is a true marvel. It was developed sans specific theory, save deep and wise aerodynamic knowledge, but designed with full wing articulation and plenty power, plus actuators, servos and gyros. Then taught to fly. Fly, crash, change gains, fly, crash, etc, and finally fly -- fly away, birdy!
That little 14 gm miracle, flies forwards, backwards, sideways, up, down and no where (hover). With on-board TV, Nature's version (about the same weight) no got that! Interestingly, the flapping lift system is not biomimetic for its own sake, but because it permits: zero flight speed and weird maneuvers, banging into things without breaking airframe stuff, and, obviously, superb camouflage.
You can look it up, amigo. Uno milagro!
Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures
Expertise is not knowing everything, but knowing what to look for.
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