LEARNING how to fly took nature millions of years of trial and error. But a winged robot has cracked it in only a few hours, using the same evolutionary principles.
Krister Wolff and Peter Nordin of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, built a winged robot and set about testing whether it could learn to fly by itself, without any pre-programmed data on what flapping is or how to do it.
The robot had metre-long wings made from balsa wood and covered with a light plastic film. Small motors on the robot let it move its wings forwards or…
