Dr Ornithopter

摘要

Leonardo da vinci could only dream of flight using mechanical flapping wings, but James De Laurier has spent much of his engineering career making it a reality. Bird-like aircraft, known as ornithopters, proved a dead-end for many pioneering aviation engineers of the late 19th century, hut 100 years later flapping wing-powered robots are potentially the US military's latest toy. De Laurier, a professor at the University of Toronto's Institute for Aerospace Studies, can take much of the credit for making that possible and now sees a decades-long engineering obsession bearing fruit. The amiable Canadian-American finds himself involved with some of the US defence establishment's most cutting-edge research, while his university team has built a person-carrying ornithopter that 'hopped' into the record books in 1999.