For years, I’ve sat in my room, wondering: When will someone get around to building me a remote-controlled, helium-filled, airborne, robotic jellyfish that floats that swims through the sky with tentacles and fins? Thankfully, finally the engineers at Festo have answered my silent prayers. The makers of the flying robotic manta ray have built the AirJelly. And the lighter-than-air machine is up and soaring — or, at least, swinging from a pendulum.
The Festo folks say that "seeking recourse to jellyfish as a source of inspiration for powering gas-filled balloons" was "an obvious thought; after all, a jellyfish consists of water to 99%. Its weight-to-volume ratio is approximately 1, and the figure is similar for a gas-filled balloon… the diversity of jellyfish species suggests a high degree of adaptability."
So when they designed their battery-powered, five-foot-diameter AirJelly, they decided to mimic the jellyfish’s locomotion as much as possible. Eight spur gears power eight shafts, "each of which activates a crank; these in turn move the jellyfish’s eight tentacles. Each tentacle is designed as a structure with Fin Ray Effect® – a construction derived from the functional anatomy of a fish’s fin."
(High five: Airshipworld)
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