DARPA-funded Nano Hummingbird spybot takes flight (video) AeroVironment Develops World's First Fully Operational Life-Size Hummingbird-Like Unmanned Aircraft for DARPA • Two-wing, Flapping Aircraft Hovers and Flies in Any Direction • Total Weight of Two-thirds of an Ounce Includes Batteries and Video Camera WASHINGTON, at AAAS Conference, Feb. 17, 2011 – AeroVironment, Inc.
(AV)(NASDAQ: AVAV) today announced it has accomplished a technical milestone never before achieved -- controlled precision hovering and fast-forward flight of a two-wing, flapping wing aircraft that carries its own energy source, and uses only the flapping wings for propulsion and control. The milestone was part of the Phase II contract awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to AV to design and build a flying prototype "hummingbird-like" aircraft for the Nano Air Vehicle (NAV) program. The technical goals for the Phase II effort were set out by DARPA as flight test milestones for the aircraft to achieve by the end of the contract effort. 1. Guy Gets Thrown From Truck And Survives Video. Perimeter Marble Run RBS. Air-Blowing Robot Makes Ping-Pong Balls Jump Through Hoops | Gadget Lab. Sure, you can make a ping-pong ball float just by blowing at it through a drinking-straw, but wouldn’t a ball-levitating robot be so much more fun?
Luckily for us, University of Illinois grad students Aaron Becker and Robert Sandheinrich answered “yes” to this question, and built this incredible machine: It’s called the Robo-Air Blower, and while the principle is pretty simple, the physics behind it are complex. A gimbaled nozzle fires compressed air at 620 kPa of pressure. This jet creates a fast-moving, low pressure area around the ball, trapping it. The jet is powerful enough to lift balls of between 24mm and 194mm in diameter, and up to 188-grams of mass. But the tricky part is control. Despite this somewhat dry explanation, the results are spectacular. Robo-Air Blower Makes Ping-Pong Balls, Apples Defy Gravity [Automaton / IEEE Spectrum] See Also: Firecracker Vs Fish Tank Video. Lowrider Flips Upside-Down And Crashes Video. Digital Trendsâ Top 5 Viral Videos of the Week, September 24, 2010. Bulldozer Falls Through Frozen Lake Video.
Just Give It More Gas. Lagoa Multiphysics 1.0 blows our minds with a shockwave of charcoal dust (video) Dumb Jet Pilot Lifts Landing Gear Too Soon Video. Daredevil Turtle (VIDEO) How Not To Move An Old Statue. FLY. Bullfighter Christian Hernandez runs out of ring in Mexico, arre. Stellar DSLR Time Lapse of a Space Shuttle Launch.
Awesome Rally Car Turn. Truck Multicar Crash. Airport tollbooth. A good Friend of Unfair Park, through a friend of a friend of a friend, just shot us this extraordinary video captured early yesterday morning at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. Took place at the north toll plaza, which served as a launching ramp for one drunk driver trying to exit the airport in a hurry. DFW spokesman David Magana confirms: "The driver was, as you might guess, suspected of inebriation and investigated for such and arrested for such. " We also have fiery post-crash pics after the jump -- because after the driver went all General Lee, she got out and made a call on her cell, at which point the vehicle went boom.
Hard to believe the "driver only suffered minor injuries," as Magana puts it. Watch Another Arsonist Sets Himself On Fire Video. The mini-flying drones that join together for takeoff - without. By Niall Firth Updated: 00:49 GMT, 10 June 2010 It conjures up a rather frightening vision of a future where intelligent robots work in packs without the need for human intervention. But scientists are developing robots which can 'dock' with each other and fly together in a swarm. Using infrared beams the drones are able to find each others' location and connect with one another using magnets, completely autonomously. Scroll down to watch a video of the robot swarm in flight The individual vehicles - or quadrocopters - have fixed propellers that can lift them into the air, but the resulting flight is erratic and uncontrolled.
But once they are joined together these relatively simple little robots evolve into a sophisticated multi-propeller system capable of coordinated flight. Each helicopter unit has its own motor, computer, and sensors. As well as a mini-propellor duct system for flying they also have little wheels underneath to let them crawl around the ground and find each other. Mike Conway Suffers Leg Injury in Terrifying Indy 500 Crash -- M. As Dario Franchitti was closing in on victory at the Indianapolis 500 on Sunday, Mike Conway was closing in on Ryan Hunter-Reay.
The big difference was that while a full-of-adrenaline Franchitti went on to win the world's biggest race, Conway went to the hospital after a horrific wreck with an out of gas Hunter-Reay. "I had nowhere to go," Hunter-Reay said after the race. He was also involved in an earlier incident with Scott Dixon in the pits, causing torn ligaments in his right thumb that will require surgery Monday. With no fuel and no power, Hunter-Reay's car was essentially a sitting duck, unable to get out of the way to avoid a collision with Conway, whose car struck the left side of Hunter-Reay's car, sending the 26-year-old Conway's car airborne and virtually upside down into the catch fence, disintegrating into hundreds of pieces that littered the track. "I saw him flipping over Hunter-Reay, and I lifted to try and avoid it," Brazilian rookie Ana Beatriz said. Autonomous quadrocopter flies through windows, straight into our. Bad Drivers: We All Have Our Moments [Videos] | Auto in the News.
People do funny things while driving. Everyone is guilty. Fortunately for many of us, not a lot of people see our screw ups. What happens when people do, though? It gets put up on YouTube, of course! As the title suggests, it’s best to not steal someone’s parking space! We should all know that pedestrians have the right of way. Who hasn’t dreamed of doing something like this? Funny commercial teaching someone to drive. Here’s a little compilation of some funny moments, and hopefully, some situations we will never be in, or never have been in!
People do crazy things. Stay in the know; Auto in the News. TV: videos de toros y toreros. Man Escapes Epic Truck Crash With the Mother of All Sprints - As. In a First, Full-Sized Robo-Copter Flies With No Human Help | Danger Room. In mid-June, a single-turbine helicopter took off from a test field in Mesa, Arizona, avoided obstacles during flight, scoped out a landing site and landed safely. It’s the kind of flight choppers have made tens of thousands of times before. Except this time, the helicopter did it entirely on its own — with no humans involved. It was the first fully autonomous flight of a full-sized chopper, ever. The trial, overseen by Army-funded research team from Carnegie Mellon and the Piasecki Aircraft Corporation, has sent robo-choppers into the sky before (see the video, after the jump). And this Boeing-modified MD530F helicopter, known as the Unmanned Little Bird has been making flights since 2004.
But this was its first test without a pre-programmed flight path. Unmanned smart choppers could help the military better handle dangerous territory and low-visibility conditions to evacuate wounded soldiers or bring supplies to the front lines. Photo: Sanjiv Singh See Also: Cooperative Grasping and Transport using Quadrotors. The Adventure of English. The Adventure of English is a British television series (ITV) on the history of the English language presented by Melvyn Bragg as well as a companion book, also written by Bragg.
The series and the book are cast as an adventure story, or the biography of English as if it were a living being, covering the history of the language from its modest beginnings around 500 AD as a minor Germanic dialect to its rise as a truly established global language. In the television series, Bragg explains the origins and spelling of many words based on the times in which they were introduced into the growing language that would eventually become modern English. 1. Birth of a Language. The modern Frisian language is the closest sounding language to the English used approximately 2000 years ago, when the people from what is now the north of the Netherlands travelled to what would be the United Kingdom and pushed the Celts to the western side of the island. 2. English Goes Underground. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.