The Canadian team behind the first sustained flight of an ornithopter flapping wings-powered aircraft believes the prospect of a manned craft is now real, despite video evidence showing the ...

Flapping-wing ornithopter drones may potentially be more agile and energy-efficient than their fixed-wing counterparts, but most of them still can't loiter in one spot. A new model addresses that ...

A drone prototype that mimics the aerobatic manoeuvres of one of the world's fastest birds, the swift, is being developed by an international team of engineers in the latest example of biologically ...

One of humankind’s dreams has always been to fly like a bird. For a hacker, an achievable step along the path to that dream is to make an ornithopter — a machine which flies by flapping its wings. An ...

Robotics researchers regularly turn to the natural world for inspiration, and those working on machines that fly are no different. An international team of scientists has taken this approach to ...

Flapping its mechanical wings, a hummingbird-like "ornithopter" built by Brigham Young University students is at once an engineering feat and a sign of things to come in unmanned surveillance ...

Researchers have developed a method that allows a flapping-wing robot to land autonomously on a horizontal perch using a claw-like mechanism. The innovation could significantly expand the scope of ...

Isn’t it wonderful that there are researchers out there whose job is quite simply to make a robotic bird? That’s certainly the goal of this lab, whose flapping-wing drone, or ornithopter, has now been ...