Turns out, that's harder than it sounds. The prize has been unclaimed for more than three decades.
Da Vinci's ornithopter never did fly, but Students at MIT created a working ornithopter and for those of you with a lot of time on your hands here is the official paper
Well its not really feasible to be a Renaissance man anymore, the cut off point was around the mid 1800s. Back there was maybe a few thousand people working on research, but now there are millions of people working in every field, and unless you are some kind of savant it is impossible to become an expert in all of them.
Fun. Looks like height is within reach. Now how do they stay in a 10 meter range? Steering four rotors is quite a challenge. Maybe the trick is to hover just off the ground for the majority of the 60 seconds, then drive hard for the height as quick as possible to lessen any chance of drift.
I think that the one wheel with the screws was a gyroscope of sorts. I would guess that the biggest difficulty is height, and once they acheive that, they can just keep tweaking the setup until they can manage to keep in one place long enough.
I'm sure the 4-rotor setup is optimal since both groups used it. However, I still wonder if you couldn't get by with one big rotor and a small counter-rotation rotor. It would have fewer moving parts, and be lighter. You might have to have them working on separate drives though, like feet for the big rotor, and hands for the small one.
- Maybe the trick is to hover just off the ground for the majority of the 60 seconds, then drive hard for the height as quick as possible to lessen any chance of drift.
My read was that they had to stay at 3 meters for 1 minute.
- I'm sure the 4-rotor setup is optimal since both groups used it.
I was thinking that one larger shaft with multiple stacked rotors could be effective also, but it seems like the kind of thing where one team had some success with an idea and everyone else sort of followed suite. Interesting how design often has to become iterative in an inbred sort of way for any real progress to be made. It has to be so edited in order to control it, that there is sometimes no way out of that particular thought stream.
What an enjoyable read and a fantastic video. I love the enthusiasm of the participants and the passion of the engineers involved, "it's not a problem, it's a challenge". -They'll get there.
Yeah I don't think I have the willpower to work for years for inches. But one thing I find funny is that if this were achieved and was viable and easy, it would not have any place as a transportation device. Sure it sounds like a great idea until you take into account that thousands of people would be piloting them, the jetpack also has the same problems.
I think it's obviously not about viability but about the engineering challenge. That said, it may lead to technology and designs that are viable in other ways, right? I feel like challenging yourself to do something new and unprecedented is almost always valuable to one degree or another.
Yeah I know its not being done because of viability, it's for the very sake of saying it can be done( also the prize money isn't bad either). But it could be a major step for ultra-light aircraft. NASA has flown a solar powered ultra-light for 2 weeks straight, this opens up a whole worlds of possibility, literally, Ultra-light aircraft could be used to survey the gas giants.