A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
The robots use something called electrostatic adhesion, the same process by which statically-charged balloons stick to walls. Perching allows the robots to conserve energy. The findings, reported in the journal Science, contribute to a decade-longHarvard Microrobotics Laboratory project called "RoboBee". The robots in this study are programmed drones, each around the size of a 10 pence coin. Dr Mirko Kovac, director of the Aerial Robotics Laboratory of Imperial College, London, who was not involved in this study, told BBC News that similar robots were currently being trialled in environmental monitoring and disaster-relief efforts. Dr Kovac, who develops flying robots in his own lab, wrote a paper in the same issue of Science explaining how nature had inspired the design of RoboBee and other robotic perching mechanisms. Equipped with sensors, swarms of such small, relatively cheap robots, Dr Kovac explained, could alert first responders to the most...