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A robot that flies like a bird

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Plenty of robots can fly -- but none can fly like a real bird. That is, until Markus Fischer and his team at Festo built SmartBird, a large, lightweight robot, modeled on a seagull, that flies by flapping its wings. A soaring demo fresh from TEDGlobal 2011.

Markus Fischer led the team at Festo that developed the first ultralight artificial bird capable of flying like a real bird. Full bio »

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