Are bio-inspired drones the next big thing in unmanned flight?
A series of studies, supported by startup developments, suggest that nature-inspired drones are the future of flying.
Plans for the future of airlift include seeing a small army of drones compete for space in the skies the 50 billion birds worldwide. But there’s also the potential of a halfway house, where bird-like drones will eventually fly alongside the animals they’re inspired by and traditional quadcopters.
A new series of drones inspired by nature, many of which are spin-offs from universities, are attracting the attention of investors. Animal dynamics, which launched in 2015 as a spin-off from a University of Oxford project and has since raised £35 million, is selling the Stork parafoil drone, which – while not much like an animal – takes inspiration from nature as to how it works. (An earlier project, Skeeter, was more inspired by the movement of a dragonfly’s wings, including the flapping propulsion.)
“We understand that there are things in nature that have developed really excellent solutions to problems we face as humans as well,” said Ian Foster, Head of Engineering at Animal Dynamics, one of the company’s 91 employees.
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That is something that Matěj Karásek sees in his own company. Karásek is the founder of the Dutch startup Fin (formerly Flapper Drones), a spin-off of TU Delft, which has two employees and raised € 100,000 in seed money. The university project had been running for nearly two decades and was designed to try and develop a bio-inspired drone that was lightweight.
The aspect of size and scale is a necessary evil, says Karásek. “One of the main advantages of bio-inspired drones is that they have to be small because of the physics,” he explains. That allows them to perform more detailed, fine-tuned tasks that larger drones can’t – making a virtue of what initially seems like a limitation.
Making a large nature-inspired drone runs into the same problem as the dodo: it can’t fly. Small size has another advantage: “If you keep them small, they are very safe, not only because of their size, but also because they have soft wings,” says Karásek.
Christoffer Johansson of Lund University, part of a university research team that recently published a paper outlining the development of a robotic bird wingalso sees safety as an advantage of bio-inspired drones.
“Quadcopters are prone to damage,” he says. “If they hit something, they break. Fluttering ones may be less sensitive and possibly something that can be restarted if it crashes.
Points of differentiation
Animal Dynamics’ Stork drone doesn’t see size as an issue. Its parafoil can carry a payload of 135 kilograms for up to 400 km, thanks to the nature-inspired revolution of gliding for miles without powering the engine. areas on.
“We want to be able to work in places where they are very remote,” he says. “We are providing aid to an area where the infrastructure has collapsed. There will be no airport there.”
But for drone companies like Flapper trying to find a niche in more built-up, populated environments, safety is an area where it sees its range of bio-inspired drones as a key point of differentiation. “If you fly into something with a conventional drone, the sharp propellers can cut into things, but with soft wings, they actually bounce off objects,” says Karásek.
Flapper was founded in 2019 to solve an entirely different market need in the entertainment world. Karásek envisioned his bird-like drones taking the place of real birds in theme park shows. Then the pandemic hit and demand in the industry suddenly collapsed. Flapper has since looked beyond the entertainment industry and touted his drone as the world’s first commercially available bio-inspired drone that can float in the air.
And it’s not just hovering that the new range of bio-inspired drones can do differently than quadcopters already on the market.
“There are still a lot of things that animals can do much better than mechanical drones,” says Arthur Holland Michel, author of a book on the history of drones. “For example, the possibility to sit on different surfaces and structures. Or to take off and land vertically without using much energy, to fly agile and fast, or to fly for a very long time.” For those reasons, bio-inspired drones are extremely promising,” says Michel.
Safety and subtlety
The lack of pushiness is one way Flapper hopes to market his wares. In addition to the drone’s ability to hover and its safety should a collision occur, Flapper also says it’s quieter than more traditional quadcopter competitors. “It’s a different frequency,” says Karásek. “It’s not this high-pitched hum of a propeller, but it’s more low-frequency, less intrusive and more pleasant.”
All of this is important, the Flapper team believes, as the use of drones becomes more common and integrated into our daily lives. The commercial drone sector is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 24% per year through 2030, according to an industry analysis.
“As we use more and more robots and flying robots, we will be surrounded by them,” says Karásek. “Safety becomes very important, because that now limits the use of drones.”
Regulation is cited by both Karásek and Foster as one of the main factors inhibiting their growth. “As we build trust with regulators, we can expand,” says Foster. “It is a phased, step-by-step approach. It’s not a matter of developing a product, selling it to someone and off you go. The regulatory framework is not there at the moment.”
Even if they were, these bio-inspired drones have their drawbacks. The most sci-fi-esque plans for the future use of drones include hauling relatively large loads, clearing road networks of trucks and instead transporting products in the air. That’s something bio-inspired drones struggle with.
At the moment, Flapper sells drones with a wingspan of 50 cm, which Karásek calls “quite large”. The company plans to reduce the size of the devices rather than expand them. With the current state of technology and hardware, Karásek believes it is possible to make his drones half the size they are today, but that also involves trade-offs, thanks to limitations on the actuator technology.
Karásek declined to share the number of drones Flapper had sold, but said the company was focused more on quality than quantity — and was looking into markets outside the mainstream.
“If we compete with toy manufacturers, they will simply copy us,” claims Karásek. “If we against [giant Chinese drone manufacturer] DJI, they just copy us too. We are trying to find our own way to keep developing the technology, but keep our niche.”
The current focus on bio-inspired drones reflects interest in the romantic nature of the drone, Michel believes.
“In addition to their potential practical benefits, bio-inspired drones also have significant narrative power,” he says. “They just seem so futuristic and they tap into a primal human fascination. A drone that looks like a bat or an eagle will spark a lot more interest than a plain old quadcopter.”
The nature-inspired designs also benefit from a broader commitment to sustainability, Foster believes.
“Nature is very efficient,” he says. “Nature doesn’t have that much energy to throw around. As humans, we have gone through a phase in which energy was cheap. You could mine another piece out of the ground and throw some more fuel on it.
The niche of bio-inspired drones is also one that European countries are better off tackling, rather than competing with Chinese and US giants on more mainstream drones, which have established companies that are already well established. The point of differentiation is key in a competitive, growing industry. And in a space where off-the-shelf drones are traditionally thought of as quadcopters, these more bio-inspired versions stand out.
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