Or build a big hut to shelter in and maybe also become a train. They could jump and run around and show of to other kids. With a kite this large, the kids could transform into a ten meter long dragon. “Kitepower looks like it has a futuristic dragon skin”, Fransien fantasises. She says: “We could use straws to make the shape, pull through little cords and find very thin paper to lift the entire toy in the air.” Make a big dragonĬhildren also love pretending to be something they’re not. A re-engineering process would allow them to experience what is needed to keep a kite like this floating in the wind, without any help. Fransien tells me that children learn most through playing and making things themselves. “We once tried to build our own mini-parachutes in class, maybe we could make this as well?”, is her first thought. Her understanding of how kids grow and learn is incredible, and we were curious how Fransien would use this robot innovation in the context of her work. She has been educating four to six year-old children for 36 years. To explore this, we took Kitepower to Fransien Godeke, a kindergarten teacher in the Bilt.
While this technology is being optimised, we were wondering: could there be a different, totally unexpected way of using this technology? The technical challenge now is to get fly the kite above a certain altitude and make its flight autonomous so the system can work without human interaction. In England, the idea is to build kite stations in the sea, but in the Netherlands, KitePower is looking to launch them on solid land. KitePower is the company founded to bring this product to market. Using only the vital parts of a wind-turbine, KitePower is cheaper to make, less noisy and more durable than traditional windmills. This ground station senses when to reel in the kite to convert a maximum of motion – or kinetic energy – into electricity. The result is a big sail floating high up in the air with a small unit that automatically steers, controls the pulling force and connects to the ground station. Professor Schmehl explains his research: “We explored the idea of wind energy through the use of robotically engineered kites”. Kitepower uses wind to provide us with energy, but rather than simply sticking a big fan in the air and waiting for air flows to come and go, it latches on to the wind and stays with it. This innovative solution harmonises power generation with the flows of the atmosphere.
As this happens, the motion of the unwinding rope generates electricity. From kindergarten teacher Fransien, we learn that big kites could also be child’s play, quite literally.Ī robot wheels in the kite and then slowly releases it, painting 8-shaped loops on the sky.
#Human diy kite series
In this series of articles, we take robot innovations from their test-lab and bring them to a randomly selected workplace in the outside world. The robotic kite looks set to make its debut in the energy sector, but often inventions are used in unexpected ways. Since 2007, two professors at the TU Delft have been researching ways to harvest energy from the wind using a kite.
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