Festo SmartBird takes off at TED

On Friday 15^th July, Festo presented the SmartBird to a packed audience at the TED Global conference in Edinburgh.

TED is an international non profit organisation dedicated to Ideas Worth Spreading. They televise their two annual conferences on the web free of charge (although attending the conference for 4 days will cost the attendee $6000 per ticket !). As you can imagine the conferences are attended by some of the world’s most influential people.

To have the chance to present at TED is a great honour, by invitation only and individuals that have presented in the past include:

Douglas Adams                                                             Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the world wide web)

Bono                                                                             Richard Branson

Gordon Brown                                                                Jackson Browne

David Cameron                                                              Bill Clinton

Prof Brian Cox                                                               Richard Dawkins (evolutionary biologist)

Peter Gabriel                                                                 Bill Gates (CEO of Microsoft)

Stephen Hawking                                                           Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple)

Martin Luther King jr                                                       Annie Lennox

Malcolm McLaren                                                          Michelle Obama (1st lady of the USA)

Jamie Oliver                                                                  JK Rowling

To have Markus Fischer from Festo and the Festo Bionics team there to present was a great achievement for Festo and at the end of the presentation they received a unanimous standing ovation.

TED have now released the video on the web and the Festo talk is top on the trending charts on the TED home page. Here is a link directly to the video, the talk is only 6 minutes long so I would encourage everybody to watch it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/a_robot_that_flies_like_a_bird.html

In addition Festo were invited to fly the birds at the final conference party in the park in Edinburgh. They took a small amount of video of the SmartBird flying in open air and being joined by over 50 real gulls, who swooped and dive bombed the SmartBird. This is the first time the Festo robot had ever flown with real birds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I60tCIGbJ4

You may be rightly asking why are Festo doing this ... simply put through nature Festo are exploring and developing ideas they can use to make advancments in their automation products.

Hope you enjoy the links and in time benefit from Festo's research