Bird sized airplane to fly like a swift

Nine Dutch Aerospace Engineering students at the Delft University of Technology, together with the Department of Experimental Zoology of Wageningen University, designed the RoboSwift. RoboSwift is a micro airplane fitted with shape shifting wings, inspired by the common swift, one of nature's most efficient flyers.
The RoboSwift team presented the design on the yearly Design Synthesis symposium at TU Delft. The team will build the high-tech micro airplane in the following months; it is expected to fly in January 2008. The student team will build three RoboSwifts to participate in March 2008 in the First American-Asian Micro Air Vehicle competition in India.
The micro airplane will have unprecedented wing characteristics; the wing geometry as well as the wing surface area can be adjusted continuously. This makes RoboSwift more maneuverable and efficient. Resembling the common swift, RoboSwift will be able to go undetected while using its three micro cameras to perform surveillance on vehicles and people on the ground. Furthermore, it can be employed to observe swifts in flight, thus enabling new biological research.
21/07/07 Delft University of Technology/Science Daily (press release), US

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Categories: Foreign Jul 2007, New Jul 2007