See it in action: A robot that flies like a bird | Markus Fischer - YouTube
More detail: SmartBird - Wikipedia
Remarkable! The police and military applications are obvious. Plus it’s just too cool.
While it’s cool is not practical for surveillance, too light and very little capability to carry any weight, i.e. cameras. Also being so large and light it would struggle against even a mild wind.
Yeah, but could it carry a coconut?
That would depend on where it is manufactured.
Regardless of where it was manufactured, it doesn’t even have feet. How would it grip a coconut?
Does it have dorsal guiding feathers?
Are you suggesting SmartBirds are migratory?
Well, this one, maybe, but SmartBird 2.0 or 3.0 or 7.3 will be quite a bit more useful, I’ll bet.
And how fast would it be able to fly, thus encumbered?
I’m sure you could fit a camera onto that. It weighs nearly a pound, and modern cameras don’t come anywhere near that.
More to the point, though, if you wanted a small flying robot for some practical application, why bother with the flapping? This is a neat toy, but the fact remains that we can, in fact, make propeller-driven machines.
Heck, we can make these propellor driven things.
I thought the bird was cool as hell tho.