‘BionicSwift’, the latest bionic concept from
www.festo.com Festo, has been designed to demonstrate what is possible with robotics and lightweight structures.
This mechanical bird weighs just 42gm; yet despite being 44.5cm long and having a wingspan of 68cm it extremely agile and capable of flying loops and making tight turns.
Furthermore, radio-based indoor GPS with ultra-wideband technology enables BionicSwifts to ‘fly safely and coordinate’ within a defined airspace.
Festo says the intelligent networking of flying objects and GPS routing used in the BionicSwift demonstrates a 3-D navigation system that could be used in networked factories of the future.
By precisely locating the flow of materials and goods, process workflows can be improved, and bottlenecks predicted.
Steve Sands, Festo’s head of product management and marketing, said: ‟Festo uses the natural world as a creative spur for sustainable innovation: studying natural phenomena and applying the principles to engineering challenges. The results are demonstrated as display models, which we call Bionic Concepts.
“We make these because they stimulate creativity, not only within the Festo development process but also through crowd-sourcing ideas from a diverse external audience.
“The Bionic Concepts bring together people who are interested in similar ‘key trend topics’ such as lightweight structures, machine learning and artificial intelligence.”
BionicSwift and other new innovations from the Bionic Learning Network and the Festo industrial automation development team can be seen at the We site (
www.festo.com/virtualexhibition).