Robo Raven

After years of experiments, Dr. S.K. Gupta along with students Eli Barnett, John Gerdes, Johannes Kempny, Ariel Perez-Rosado, and Luke Roberts finally succeeded in  building a bird with completely independent wings.  By programming them with arbitrary motion profiles, the group can try new in-flight aerobatics that would not have been possible before. For example, the mechanical bird can now dive and roll.   On his blog “Pursuit of Unorthodox Ideas” Dr. Gupta describes why the development of the Robo Raven was so difficult.

Eight years of experiments have taught me that designing and building robotic birds is hard, despite the apparent simplicity of the idea – flap wings to generate thrust to propel forward and use the moving air to generate lift to stay afloat. I am glad that this looked deceptively straightforward in the beginning; otherwise we would have never started on this adventurous journey. How hard can it be to build two wings and flap them using a motor? It turns out to be quite challenging if you want the bird to actually fly! This requires a long trial and error process due to the absence of accurate simulation tools. Many concepts that look good on the paper lead to a spectacular crash during the flight test, often causing a fatal injury to the robotic bird! So design iterations are painfully slow.