Robotic rotorcraft

Extract

A few of us, like Tennyson, have the gift of foreseeing the future. (see Fig. I). Another few, like Juan de la Cierva have the gift of delivering the future. They are the innovators.

Those who know Tennyson's verse will recall that his vision was of transportation by air of people and freight and also sadly of weapons. These were the tasks for which aircraft have primarily been developed – that is until recently.

Let us move back a few years from Cierva's day to view the work of another innovator – Von Karman. His machine was a harbinger of the future in that it was not designed for a transport task but for a surveillance task (Fig. 2). It did not survive for long since Von Karman lacked the light-weight, compact, electro-optical sensors available today and he was forced to carry aloft two mk 1 eyeballs attached to a heavy and bulky man.