Air Jelly??

Have a bunch of these floating like UAVs for scouting and aerial recon. A few hundred would be useful for Afghanistan.

Can you fix the link?

If you could explain a bit what air jelly is? Is that like defensive foam or more like the jelly like Napalm thing? Once again I have to add sorry for my ignorance.

A neat toy... Festo does some cool stuff, this is the video the OP tried to post.

reply to post by miniatus


Ah, now that makes sense I was wondering what the heck air jelly was, Jellies as in Jellyfish thanks for that. Really cool tech with so many applications.

very nice stealthy surveillance platform. It can hover for hours and take video. Seems useful.

Hmm works well inside an enclosed building free of high speed winds or people shooting at it. I reckon you could take this out with a slug gun.

Originally posted by deltaboy
A few hundred would be useful for Afghanistan.

Highly unlikely, from the looks of it the slightest breeze would wreak havoc on this platform.

It seems pretty clear there's a very good reason he's only flying this thing indoors.

Certainly looks like a fun indoor toy though.

This could be good in the atmospheres of extraterrestrial planets like Neptune or Jupiter, or the moons with atmospheres like Titan.

Seems a bit impractical for anything other than attracting attention to itself.

Not sure it could hold much of a load, so im not sure if it could even be used for recon work. It does look interesting though.

It could work underwater too .
An underwater version would be interesting .


here it is

Originally posted by sykickvision
Seems a bit impractical for anything other than attracting attention to itself.

It can appear invisible at a certain range. It can work autonomously. You can stick solar panels on it and it's probably float forever. If it can work underwater, then it can work in space as well.

If you build one large enough, then you can simply float loadouts into space, which is useful if you want a clandestine space program where your rocket launches aren't detected by a hundred satellites.

reply to post by Dimitri Dzengalshlevi


I hate to burst your bubble but this has only been used in doors I doubt that it could hold much weight at this point. So im not sure about the solar panel idea. However Boeing has a project called SolarEagle, which is a solar uav that can fly for up to 5 years continuosly. Also using them to go into space im not so sure about. A helium balloon can only float so high because as you get higher the air thins and the balloon will only float up to where the air equals the weight of the helium in the balloon. As you can see this device could not float up into space.

AirJelly consists of a helium-filled ballonett with a diameter of 1.35 meters. This yields a filling volume of 1.3 cubic meters of helium. Since one cubic meter of helium provides buoyancy to lift approximately one kilogram, the total weight of AirJelly, comprising its ballonett and all ancillary components, must amount to no more than 1.3 kilograms.

So far it is only an exhibit showing that a central electric drive unit in combination with an intelligent mechanism opens up new opportunities in propulsion systems for lighter-than-air flight. It is a glorified balloon that has a simple system of gears, shafts, and cranks.
www.festo.com...

reply to post by I B Dazzlin


It's only a prototype. It can be modified to work in practical conditions.

reply to post by Dimitri Dzengalshlevi


Its actually not technically a prototype but more like a demonstrator to show the ability of peristaltic motion in a lighter than air vehicle. It is like Tacit Blue and Have Blue, which were stealth demonstrators that were not really used for much other than gathering info and using it in other devices. They may use some of the technology in something else but they would need to make quit a few changes to make it able to function with a purpose. I just don't think with it being filled with helium that it will be light enough to do anything really, as it can't carry much weight.