Lightweight robots: Festo's flying circus

It doesn’t sound much like a seagull, and its eyes glow blue in a most disconcerting fashion, but it’s just as alarming when it flies too close to you. Festo’s SmartBird technically an ornithopter flaps and swoops its way around a large, empty hall at the company’s Budapest manufacturing plant before crashing, slightly ignominiously, at the feet of its controller. ’It really needs a little more height,’ he says, apologetically.

Most industrial equipment companies are fairly anonymous when it comes to their public profile, and seemingly happy to be so. But Festo, a German automation company that specialises in pneumatic and electrical actuators, is an exception. For the past few years, it has been a regular visitor to public engagement events and has seen its name emblazoned across popular science television programmes, thanks to its growing menagerie of flying creatures. And you only have to visit one of these events to see the effect that SmartBird and its older siblings the graceful, gliding AirPenguins and AirJelly have on people. Watching an AirPenguin swooping down to hover, nose to nose, with a rapt small child is surprisingly affecting.