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Why don’t airplanes have flapping wings?
by Robert Lamb | July 12, 2010
Why don’t airplanes have flapping wings? That design seems to work just fine for birds, insects and bats. Leonardo da Vinci sketched numerous flapping aircraft and “Dune” author Frank Herbert envisioned a distant future in which humans sailed the winds of a desert planet in flapping ornithopters. Yet more than a few inventors have tried to flap their way into the sky only to plummet like a stone. What gives?
So just why did European researchers build a robot with bones and muscles? And why is Josh Clark picking a fight with the machines? In this post we’ll watch Eccrrobot in action and answer these pressing questions.
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