Robot bird lands on human hand

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign demonstrated a robotic bird that lands perched on someone's hand. From UIUC:

Perching is routinely used by birds to land on objects such as tree branches, power wires, or building ledges. According to the researchers, there are two factors that make perching challenging to engineer: 1) the maneuver’s duration is very short, on the same order as the aircraft dynamics, and 2) a high level of position accuracy is required for a successful perched landing.
“Our aerial robot concept lacks a vertical tail for improved agility, similar to birds, which renders it dynamically unstable and exacerbates both of these factors,” (postdoc Aditya) Paranjape said. “We choose a perching maneuver to demonstrate the capabilities of our articulated-winged aircraft concept, novel guidance algorithms, and control design. In particular, the ability to perform perched landings on a human hand endows our robot with the ability to operate around humans.”

"First-ever demonstration of autonomous bird-like robot perching on a human hand"

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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tylerkaraszewski

Waiting for “robot hand lands on human bird”.
Brainspore

Wow, that’s worth two robot-bird-on-a-bush landings.
Harry Hawk

The hand was moving during the perching. Did that make it harder to land or was that to make it easier to land?
nathan foote

I’d like to see it done with a stationary hand, instead of a person moving their hand into the path of where the robot is falling.
inkfumes

… but birds don’t land on your hand… they fly into your head and scare the bejesus outta you.
kansas

That’s no bird. Paranjape calls it an aircraft.
annomination

Less impressive than previous results from here: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/videos.html

Check out the video perching glider. There is no steering, but they make it perch on a wire!
http://www.facebook.com/dimitrios.papagiannis Dimitrios Papagiannis

I’d be happy with “Human Bird lands on Robot Hand” .
http://dailygrail.com/ Red Pill Junkie

Do you feed it with little pieces of robotic hare?
ackpht

More robocritters for the soldier of the (near) future.
lambdaluser

Three things.

1) That’s awesome.
2) I have no doubt the narrator meant precisely everything she said.
3) I have no idea what she just said.
- http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
  
  This clearly wasn’t a video intended for the likes of us. Might as well have been in Flemish.
angryquoll

Reminds me of K9, but not so useful
http://twitter.com/EverythingBudha Everything Buddhism

NO! This is getting crazy scary!!! Soon there will be drones as small as your hand? Look at what they are doing already…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/04/rodney-brossart-american-arrested-using-predator-drone_n_1477549.html

Tons of scary drone info…
http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=drone

Drones looking in your HOUSE!!!
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/03/10/0143240/drones-dogs-and-the-future-of-privacy
Know Your Rights…
http://yro.slashdot.org/

Gmail and the government OWNS you…
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/04/07/232224/obama-administration-wants-your-old-email
LEARN!
https://www.eff.org/
http://twitter.com/Listener43 Listener43

It needs claws to really grab on as it perches … and so it can grab mice in a storeroom.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_KLDXI7FI3NUHYC23SUHMGLNBCQ Tom

I want to say I’m impressed, but it looked more like it was caught than perched. I we are looking at a beta landing algorithm. Once it can land on a swaying tree branch in a breeze then I will be wowed.