The Monospinner: a controllable flying vehicle with a single moving part in the ETH Zurich Flying Machine Arena This video introduces the monospinner, the mechanically simplest controllable flying machine in existence. It has only one moving part (the rotating propeller). The vehicle features no additional actuators or aerodynamic surfaces. The monospinner cannot hover like a […]

When early terrestrial animals began moving about on mud and sand 360 million years ago, the powerful tails they used as fish may have been more important than scientists previously realized. That’s one conclusion from a new study of African mudskipper fish and a robotic model inspired by the animal. Animals analogous to the mudskipper […]

Like innumerable children with imaginations fired by animated films, Hong Kong product and graphic designer Ricky Ma grew up watching cartoons featuring the adventures of robots, and dreamed of building his own one day. Unlike most, however, Ma has realised his childhood dream at the age of 42, by successfully constructing a life-sized robot from […]