K
Kathleen Martin
Guest
In the late 1480s, Leonardo da Vinci sketched out a clever design for a one-person helicopter propelled by an "aerial screw." You may have seen his drawings and wondered whether one of the choppers could ever take flight.
Now we know the answer. The Italian genius was right.
Starting in 2019, a University of Maryland engineering team designed and tested the underlying technology as part of a design contest. Then over the last year and a half, team member Austin Prete built Crimson Spin, an unmanned quadcopter drone using da Vinci's screwlike design, and flew it on several brief journeys.
"I was absolutely surprised it worked," said Prete, a graduate student in the university's aerospace engineering department who built the aircraft for his master's degree. He and other team members were Initially skeptical but grew more excited by da Vinci's design after some computer simulations and 3D-printed screw prototypes showed promising trends.
He presented his results -- and the first video of the aircraft flying -- at the Transformative Vertical Flight 2022 conference in San Jose, California, last week.
Continue reading: https://www.cnet.com/news/this-drone-flies-using-da-vincis-530-year-old-helicopter-design/
Now we know the answer. The Italian genius was right.
Starting in 2019, a University of Maryland engineering team designed and tested the underlying technology as part of a design contest. Then over the last year and a half, team member Austin Prete built Crimson Spin, an unmanned quadcopter drone using da Vinci's screwlike design, and flew it on several brief journeys.
"I was absolutely surprised it worked," said Prete, a graduate student in the university's aerospace engineering department who built the aircraft for his master's degree. He and other team members were Initially skeptical but grew more excited by da Vinci's design after some computer simulations and 3D-printed screw prototypes showed promising trends.
He presented his results -- and the first video of the aircraft flying -- at the Transformative Vertical Flight 2022 conference in San Jose, California, last week.
Continue reading: https://www.cnet.com/news/this-drone-flies-using-da-vincis-530-year-old-helicopter-design/
