"World's First Spherical Flying Machine" Can Land and Fly Almost Anywhere - 0 views
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Serena Zaccagnini on 29 Oct 11It's a bird! No, it's a plane! No, it's the world's first "Spherical Flying Machine," brought to you by Japan, the place where all the cool stuff seems to come from. Remember in Star Wars: A New Hope, when Luke Skywalker was practicing Jedi Lightsaber skills on a small, flying sphere that could hover and move quickly in every direction? Well, Japan's Ministry of Defense seems to have brought Jedi training balls to the world. Mostly driven by remote controls, the sphere utilizes a combination of propellers and wings to hover, fly in all directions at up yo 60 kph and can even move along the ground and walls. They created this ball to solve a problem they were having with aircrafts (they can apparently stand up vertically after flying horizontally, but take-offs and landings were "difficult," as one could have imagined). It is not known whether they will market the flying ball or not, but this is certainly a huge leap forward in the field of robotics, as well as flying.