The world we share with other species of nature - all co-existing on the one plant and sharing the same biosphere - has many life skills to share with us - if we can only see and understand. Tom McKeag who teaches bio-inspired design at the California College of the Arts and University of California, Berkeley has nominated his 2009 Tommy Awards.
The manta ray also flies underwater and inspired another Festo product that took to the skies. The Air_ray is a remote-controlled helium-filled ballonet made of aluminum vaporized PET foil and shaped like the ray. It contains a small servo that beats its 6-foot wings with a clever linkage mechanism modeled after the tail fins of many fish. Two alternating pressure and tension flanks are connected by ribs. When one flank is pressured, the structure bends from its geometry in the direction opposed to the force. While super light (the buoyancy of the helium can only support 1.6 kg of weight), the Air_ray can perform some simple maneuvers including loop-de-loops and flying backwards. The slow moving Air_ray can also carry a camera.
More to come.