DelFly

The 28 centimeter 16 gram DelFly II was capable of vertical take-off and landing and demonstrated simplified forms of autonomous flight, mainly using off-board processing.

One of its uses is in studying insect flight; mimicking the extremely fast escape maneuvers of fruit flies revealed a new aerodynamic mechanism that helps to make rapid banked turns.

[13] The DelFly project started in 2005 as a Design Synthesis Exercise for a group of Bachelor of Science students at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering of the TU Delft.

The flapping wing design was mentored by Wageningen University,[3] the remote control and micro camera integration by Ruijsink Dynamic Engineering, and the real-time image processing by the TU Delft.

The DelFly is based on scaling relations for the aerodynamic design of flapping wings,[5] which were discovered in the Dickinson lab at Caltech in collaboration with Wageningen University.

The design of autonomous, light-weight, less than 20 grams flapping wing MAVs poses challenges in various domains, including materials, electronics, control, aerodynamics, computer vision and artificial intelligence.

In turn, such onboard processing can be used to perform automatic maneuvers in a wind tunnel, helping to create better models the DelFly and its low Reynolds aerodynamics.

The exceptional flight capabilities of the DelFly Nimble, combined with its inherent safety and natural appearance, opened up new applications within the entertainment sector.