Insect Drone with Camera Flies Like a Bee

Insect Drone with Camera Flies Like a Bee Insect Drone with Camera Flies Like a Bee Insect Drone with Camera Flies Like a BeeEngineers at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have created miniature drones that fly and flit just like insects. When you watch one of their drones, called DelFly, in action, it will flutter over a green patch of grass, beating its transparent wings so fast its hard to tell how many it has exactly. It hovers over the grass, darts back and forth, and then shoots upwards making an impressive 360-degree flip, worthy of an aerobatics show.The drone flies like a bee, and some researchers hope that such flying robots could one day replicate some of the important agricultural work that bees do.DelFly Nimble held by its main developer, Matej Karasek. Image TU DelftBut when G.C.H.E. (Guido) de Croon began working on what would become DelFly, he wasnt thinking about building a mechanical pollinator. Instead, de Croon and his team at the Micro Air Vehicle s Laboratory at Delft were interested in creating a small flapping wing drone capable of carrying a camera.Editors Pick Air Taxi Aces Test FlightThe first DelFly, built in 2008 by 11 students as a capstone project, was insect-like, but on a scale of the giant dragonflies from the Carbonaceous era. Made from ultra-lightweight materialsthin sheets of Mylar stretched over a carbon fiber frameit weighed 21 grams (slightly less than an AA battery) and had a wingspan of 50 cm.DelFly Nimble in stationary (hovering) flight. Image Henri Werij, TU Delft.Over time, as the Delft team learned more, the drones miniaturized. DelFly II had about half the wingspan and could hover and fly forward and backward, staying airborne for 15 minutes. DelFly Micro shrunk to 3 grams and a 10 cm wingspan. The Guinness Book of Records named it the smallest camera-equipped aircraft in the world.Thats still enormous as bees go. A worker honeybee weighs about 130 milligrams and has a wingspan of less than 1 cm.List en to ASME TechCast to Find Out How a High School Senior Helped a Wounded MarineAs the drones lost mass, they added capability. The 2013 DelFly Explorer gained autonomous navigation, thanks to a stereovision camera and hardware for processing obstacle detectionno mean feat for a system that could only weigh a few grams. Self-driving cars make complete 3D maps of their environment to feed into their obstacle detection algorithms, but that requires sensors, processors, and memory, even the lightest of which would be too heavy for a gossamer robot to lift.So the team built different vision algorithms, inspired by hunting dragonflies. If you ask a biologist how dragonflies catch flies, the current hypothesis is that they keep it in the same position while making it bigger and bigger as they approach it, de Croon said. So you could make it very complicated and calculate the flys velocity and directionor you can use the same kind of simple intelligence they use. Thats what we didwe either programmed it into the robot, or tried to make the robot learn it by itself.More Useful Robots The 7 Coolest Rescue Robots Tackle Almost Any DisasterThe drones learned to avoid collisions, but they werent very stable in flight. Even when they flew inside a room, an air-conditioners draft could toss them around. They needed more agility to recover from such gusts. The team realized they had to abandon some of the traditional concepts of flying machines and once again watch how insects work.The result was the DelFly Nimble. Unlike its predecessors, whose flight is controlled similar to conventional airplanes via deflections of specific surfaces on the tail or behind the wings, DelFly Nimble has neither. Instead, it is controlled by insect-inspired motion adjustments of its two pairs of flapping wings.The tails absence makes DelFly Nimble very agile and less vulnerable to wind. That enables it to dart as nimbly as a fly escaping a swatterand then straighten itself out and return to it s original heading.If you try to swat a fly, it will make a super sharp turn like a fighter jet, and then it will quickly turn its body into the flight direction again, de Croon explained. Whats really interesting, he added, is that the fly doesnt do it consciously. It does so passively, essentially relying on the aerodynamic forces specific to its flapping wings.Even more surprisingly, so does the robot, even though it hasnt been programmed to do it.The robot also corrects for the flight direction error, but we know for sure that we didnt put this into the control code, de Croon said. Its a new effect and we think it applies to all flapping wings.The Delft engineers have various practical applications in mind. For example, when perfected, the bots could flit around greenhouses spotting plant diseases with their cameras.More on Agriculture Innovation 5 Ways How Digital Farm Technology Is Transforming AgricultureThe robots could also be fitted with apparatuses to perform an even more vital and insect-like taskpollinating crops. That sounds like something out of the Black Mirror television series, but the idea of building robotic pollinators predates that. A mysterious plague called colony collapse disorder has decimated entire beehives worldwide during the past 20 years. Scientists pondered many possible causes of bees plight, including pesticides, habitat loss, poor diet due to the limited variety of agricultural crops, parasites called Varroa destructor mites, and other pestsor a combination of these factors.No matter the cause, science provided no clear remedy for the little creatures that helped our crops bear harvests for millennia. In America, bees pollinate about 80 percent of flowering plants and about 75 percent of the nuts, fruits, and vegetables humans eat, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Other countries are similarly dependent on healthy bees to assist in food production.While scientists rush to pin down the cause of colony collapse disorder and race to find a cure, engineers have wondered whether we might one day supplement real bees with mechanical ones. Bringing DelFy to greenhouses will take more time and work. Commercial pollinating will also require many such bots operating in an organized fashion, something no group has yet perfected. Lina Zeldovich is a freelance writer in Woodside, N.Y.Read More Exclusive Stories from ASME.org Robots to the Rescue Solving World Hunger with 3D-Printed Food Engineers Making Waves in AquacultureYou could make it very complicated and calculate the flys velocity and directionor you can use the same kind of simple intelligence they use. G.C.H.E. (Guido) de Croon, Delft University of Technology

The ABCs of Personal Branding, According to a PR Expert

The ABCs of Personal Branding, According to a PR ExpertThe ABCs of Personal Branding, According to a PR Expert In the digital world we live in, the concept of personal branding has never been mora important.Think about the products you buy every day and why you buy them. For me, I buy Nike shoes, Lululemon clothes and just recently bought a Boss suit (a little splurge, but worth it). I am willing to pay more for these products because I view them as trustworthy and reliable thanks to their branding as well as my personal experience with the product. Its also why I prefer Starbucks coffee even though its more expensive than making coffee at home. But the experience is consistent, and the coffee has never let me down.At Mercury Marine , our brand is, among others, reliability. When you put a Mercury engine on your boat, you can always count on that engine to perform and help you create amazing experiences with friends and family.So why dont we view ourselves through th e same lens as we do our favorite brands? People buy what we are selling every day. At some point in our lives, we are going to apply for something. Whether its a job, internship or home loan, you will put yourself in front of someone and must convince them to give you something you want. In this instance, you are the brand. Companies are marketing themselves every day to consumers as a personal brand, you should be doing the same.A quote I once heard that I absolutely love should be plastered on your wall at work. If you arent branding yourself, you can bet someone else is and you probably wont like what they have to say.People are willing to invest in YOU if your brand is strong. Personally, I work every day to make sure my brand remains strong you could say it keeps me up at night. Im a firm believer that when I wake up every morning, I have to prove myself all over again, its what keeps the focus on my brand. A personal brand is the spawn of how you see yourself and how ot hers view you, its a meeting in the middle. Its in how you dress, how you talk, how you compose yourself. Its about your resume, your experience anddrum rollyour social media. All of that together defines who you are.Here are my A, B, Cs of personal brandingAppealing We buy brands that are appealing. As a personal brand, someone will invest in you if you are an appealing brand.Believable Is what you are selling believable? When Nike or Mercury Marine is marketing, do I believe in their message? When Im marketing myself, are people believing what Im selling?Consistent Its the Starbucks example. As a personal brand, when people interact with me, their experience must be consistent. Im not treating our security team any different than our CEO.Distinctive This is the single most important trait in developing a personal brand. What makes you stand out from the rest? Ill dig deeper into this one in a minute.Evolving Your brand must constantly evolve. What you did as a freshman in high school isnt applicable as a professional. Find ways to evolve your brand.Think about your brand as your health. If you exercise, youll be healthy if you sit around all day, your body and mind will suffer. Its the same with your brand. If you exercise your brand, itll continue to evolve and define who you are. If you dont spend any time on it, someone else will.Now back to why being distinctive is so important. We live in a world where everything looks the same, sounds the same and feels the same a Sea of Sameness. When you graduate, you walk across the stage and get a diploma. Your diploma looks the same as mine. As an employer, for every job we have open, we receive hundreds of resumes, LinkedIn profiles, etc. More times than not, they all look the same. Your brand needs to stand out above the rest. Graduating top of your class from Harvard is impressive, but its not going to guarantee you the job.Here are four things you can do to help define your personal brandO ur world moves at the speed of light and we live in a what have you done for me lately world. Theres no real-time anymore its NOW-TIME. Creating and defining your personal brand is extremely important in fact, its a must. Like anything, it takes time and hard work. But if you do it right, you will create a lasting memory of yourself when you leave the room. So, ask yourself, what are people saying about you when you leave the room? And, are you OK with what they are saying? That will help you determine whether your brand is strong or needs some work.Lee Gordon is the Director of Global Public Relations and Communications for Mercury Marine , a division of Brunswick Corporation . Prior to taking the role at Mercury, Lee was a television anchor for CBS and FOX for 15 years and a sideline reporter for the NFL on FOX.Want to develop your personal brand alongside Lee? Mercury Marine is always looking for great talent. Check out their latest job opportunities

Heres the most dangerous proverb in the English language

Heres the fruchtwein dangerous proverb in the English languageHeres the most dangerous proverb in the English languageCuriosity killumineszenzdiode the cat.Or as the Russians say with far more dramatic flair, Curious Barbaras nose was torn off at the market.These proverbs, according to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, are used to warn of the dangers of unnecessary investigation or experimentation.Curiosity, in cats or in Russian market-goers, isnt just annoying or inconvenient. Curious people arent just pesky troublemakers who cant be satisfied with the status quo. Theyre downright dangerous. As the legendary Hollywood producer Brian Grazer writes, The child who feels free to ask why the sky is blue grows into the adult who asks more disruptive questions Why am I the serf and you the king? Does the sun really revolve around Earth? Why are people with dark skin slaves and people with light skin their masters?Curiosity also requires an admission of ignorance. Asking a question means that w e dont know the answer, and thats an admission that few of us are willing to make. For fear of sounding dumb, we assume most questions are too basic to ask, so we dont ask them.In this era of move beinahe and break things, curiosity can also seem like an unnecessary luxury. With an inbox-zero ethos and an unyielding focus on hustle and execution, answers appear efficient. They illuminate the path forward and give us that life hack so we can move onto the next thing on our to-do list. Questions, on the other hand, are exceedingly inefficient. They dont yield immediate answers, so theyre unlikely to get a slot on our overloaded calendars.So we wait until a crisis occurs to become curious and start asking questions. Its only when were laid off that we begin to ponder alternative career paths. Its only when our business is disrupted by a young, scrappy, and hungry competitor that we gather the troops to spend a few futile hours thinking outside the box. But by that point, the ship has a lready sailed. Just ask Blockbuster, Kodak, Borders, and the entire cab industry.Our education system is also to blame. In most classrooms, theres little room for curiosity and experimentation. An authority figure steps up to the szene to feed us the truth. Textbooks magically reveal the right answers to questions. We learn about Newtons laws - as if they arrived by a grand divine visitation or a stroke of genius - but not the years he spent exploring and revising them (not to mention his experiments in alchemy, which attempted, and spectacularly failed, to turn lead into gold).If your chemistry class was anything like mine, the outcome of each experiment was predetermined. There was no room for curiosity or unexpected insights. If you didnt get the right result, youd be stuck in the lab repeating the same experiment over and over again, while your classmates trekked off to the movies.As a result, we believe (or pretend to believe) there is one right answer to each question. We be lieve that this right answer has already been discovered by someone far smarter than us. We believe the answer can, therefore, be found in a well-crafted Google search, the latest self-help book, or advice from a self-proclaimed life coach.Fear is another reason we shun curiosity. If we spend too much time investigating and experimenting, were afraid of what we might find. Worse, were afraid that we may not find anything at all, that our inquiry led us nowhere, turning this whole curiosity business into a gigantic waste of time.Lets nip these beliefs in the bud. Unnecessary investigation and experimentation are precisely what you need for a creative personal and professional life. Hustle and innovation are antithetical to each other. You cant generate breakthroughs while clearing out your inbox. You must dig the well before youre thirsty and become curious now - not when a crisis inevitably presents itself while youre too busy staring at the rear-view mirror.Curiosity killed the ca t. But it just might save you.Ozan Varol is a rocket scientist turned law professor and bestselling author.Click hereto download a free copy of his e-book, The Contrarian Handbook 8 Principles for Innovating Your Thinking. Along with your free e-book, youll get the Weekly Contrarian - a newsletter that challenges conventional wisdom and changes the way we look at the world (plus access to exclusive content for subscribers only).This article first appeared onozanvarol.com.