If you have watched the fumbling attempts to recreate the first airplane during the celebration of the 100th anniversary of human flight last year, you might have thought little progress had been made between 1903 and 2003. But watching the real birds flocking around the robotic birds being flown over the University of Delaware recently, things changed. The "birds" built by mechanical-engineering professor Sunil Agrawal and his team at Delaware advance the capabilities of unmanned aircraft, which until now have been fixed-wing designs.
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