Aircraft Designed to Fly Like Maple Seeds

[Susano]

Researchers at the University of Maryland’s Department of Aerospace Engineering designed unmanned aerial vehicles with the aerodynamic properties of maple seeds. The team then started a company and is selling the product:

 

X-Naves has produced new prototype vehicles of an entirely different flight configuration, which have demonstrated the capability to carry a payload two times their weight or ten times the amount of their counterparts for longer durations. The prototypes have utilized an understanding of the aerodynamics of a falling maple seed to create a vehicle both naturally stable and extremely efficient. An inventor and founder of X-Naves has patented and built approximately one hundred working prototypes.

 

[Ranxerox]

Re: Aircraft Designed to Fly Like Maple Seeds

 

That's really cool! Sadly, the only things that I can think to do with it is sell it as a toy or use it to deliver explosives to where you want to detonate them. I'm sure that there are other viable uses for this technology, but I am drawing a blank as to what those uses might be.

[Cancer]

Re: Aircraft Designed to Fly Like Maple Seeds

 

Surveillance pickup delivery leaps immediately to mind.

[Zeropoint]

Re: Aircraft Designed to Fly Like Maple Seeds

 

Making the people who hack into your surveillance feeds really dizzy.

[Ranxerox]

Re: Aircraft Designed to Fly Like Maple Seeds

 

Surveillance pickup delivery leaps immediately to mind.

 

Surveillance? I can see that. The images taken from the on in the clip were little more than a blur, but with a fast enough camera and by timing your images to offset the rotation you could probably get usable images. What a maple seed surveillance drone lacked in image quality it would make up in longer flight duration and 360 degree panorama view.

 

Pickup delivery? What sort of payload? Bear in mind that since they would by necessity be pilotless drones, and people are reluctant to make drones very big. When putting tons of metal into the air and sending it across country, it is comforting to know that someone is behind the wheel. So I would think that anything that was going to be transported in a maple seed plane would, in addition to being tolerant of stress of high speed spinning, have to be not very big.

[lemming]

Re: Aircraft Designed to Fly Like Maple Seeds

 

Do something of a steady cam trick. If you can get the lens near the center of the spin (which looked possible), you could either spin the sensor or just SW correct the raw feed.

[Cancer]

Re: Aircraft Designed to Fly Like Maple Seeds

 

Pickup delivery? What sort of payload? Bear in mind that since they would by necessity be pilotless drones' date=' and people are reluctant to make drones very big. When putting tons of metal into the air and sending it across country, it is comforting to know that someone is behind the wheel. So I would think that anything that was going to be transported in a maple seed plane would, in addition to being tolerant of stress of high speed spinning, have to be not very big.[/quote']

 

What I had in mind were small audio pickup transmitters, things with the size, weight, and power level of a hearing-aid battery. My guess is that one of those unicopters would be able to carry half a dozen of them and fly those into streets and through windows into buildings without trouble. Since the copters are based on maple seeds, you could follow the witch hazel seed model for deployment of the sensors: small explosive or spring-loaded scatter release once you're near the target zone. You'll need a relay station unit nearby to pick up the low-power line-of-sight signals from those audio snoopers and rebroadcast it to your intel station, but that could be flown in manually with a larger and smarter delivery system. Video camera units may have to be larger than the unicopters could deliver efficiently, but it's still something you could posit in a game setting, at least.