October 23, 2009 — Maple tree seeds (or samara fruit) and the spiraling pattern in which they glide to the ground have delighted children for ages and perplexed engineers for decades. But now aerospace engineering graduate students at the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering have learned how to apply the seeds' unique design to devices that can hover and perform surveillance in defense and emergency situations.
According to the University of Maryland’s website, researchers first tried to create an unmanned aerial vehicle that could mimic a maple seed's spiraling fall in the 1950s. Ever since, their attempts have been foiled by instability, resulting in a lack of control over the tiny (less than one meter) vehicles, which were easily knocked off course by wind. As recently as June 2009, this was considered as an open challenge for engineers.
But the Clark School students solved the steering problem and provided a solution that allows the device to take off from the ground and hover, as well as perform controlled flight after its initial fall to the ground after being deployed from an aircraft. The device can also begin to hover during its initial descent, or after being launched by hand.
The students studied maple seeds and developed a new design incorporating the natural flight of the tiny flyers. The insight gleaned from this study enabled the creation of the world's smallest controllable single-winged rotorcraft. The maple seed-inspired design is valuable because when dropped, unpowered, from a plane and then controlled remotely, it can perform surveillance maneuvers for defense, fire monitoring and search-and-rescue purposes.
"Natural maple seeds usually trade off altitude for rotation as they fall to the ground," said Evan Ulrich, one of the graduate students on the team. This altitude-rotation trade-off results in the power that the seeds need to travel.
But this traditional design does not provide enough power to allow the device to hover.
Ulrich and other graduate students in the research group led by Clark School Dean Darryll Pines incorporated a new part to their device, a curved, comma-shaped component in the body of the device, which provides more stability and gives the device power to hover. They have two patents pending on their innovation.
Click here to see a vehicle demonstration at the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum.
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The maple seed device compared to actual samara seeds. Photo credit by Eric Schurr/A. James Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland
The smallest monocopter built to date by graduate student Evan Ulrich, with a maximum dimension of 9.5 cm and a wing equal in size to a natural samara. Photo credit by Evan Ulrich/A. James Clark School of Engineering
University of Maryland
The maple seed device in flight. Photo credit by Eric Schurr/A. James Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland
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