Revolutionary New Drone Wings Design

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A new as yet British Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (Micro-UAV) could herald the future of drones. The innovation behind it stems from what its wings do and other drones’ don’t – they change shape in response to the forces the Micro-UAV encounters.

Scientists at the Imperial College London and Southampton University are testing a new approach that will allow for longer flight distances and better conservation of energy, all due to better, adaptable aerodynamics.

In a brilliant feat of biomimetics, the team behind the project has created wings that flex, stiffen, and relax in flight much like a bird’s. What makes this possible are electroactive polymers built-in to the wings that change shape in response to applied voltage.

“There are no biological forebears for an airliner with a sixty-metre wingspan that flies at 500 miles an hour, but a drone with a one-metre wingspan that flies at 30 miles an hour is in exactly the same flying regime as many birds,” said David Hambling, author of Swarm Troopers: How Small Drones will Conquer the World.

Rafael Palacios of the Imperial College, one of the researchers behind the new Micro-UAV, prefers the word bioinspiration. And inspiration they found in the wings of a bat. One of the fundamental characteristics of a bat’s wings is the way they change shape by pretensioning through an integrated skeleton.

“We’ve successfully demonstrated the fundamental feasibility of Micro-UAVs incorporating wings that respond to their environment, just like those of the bats that have fuelled our thinking,” said Bharath Ganapathisubramani, Palacios’ colleague from Southampton.

“We’ve also shown in laboratory trials that active wings can dramatically alter the performance. The combined computational and experimental approach that characterised the project is unique in the field of bio-inspired Micro-UAV design.”

The team hope that if testing goes according to plan, this design could be incorporated into production-grade drones in as little as five years.