With their ability to both fly at high speeds and hover, the dragonfly would seem an obvious candidate for biomimicry. But with the exception of the DelFly, we hadn’t seen many attempts to model a micro UAV on the dragonfly’s four wing design. That could be changing with a multi-disciplinary team from Georgia Tech having developed a robotic four-winged ornithopter called the TechJect Dragonfly that fits in the palm of a hand and combines the flight capabilities of a quadricopter, helicopter and fixed wing aircraft in one.

 

The TechJect Dragonfly is the culmination of four years of research and development at Georgia Tech, assisted by US$1 million in funding from the U.S. Air Force. TechJect is a spinoff out of Georgia Tech’s Robotics & Intelligent Machines (RIM) Department that was created to bring the Dragonfly and other robotic flyers to market. To that end, the TechJect team has turned to crowdfunding site indiegogo to help get the Dragonfly off the ground.