This is the drone that Leonardo da Vinci designed 530 years ago, and yes, it works

Can you imagine a drone designed in the fifteenth century that flew in the middle of the year 2022? Some Maryland students have achieved it thanks to the designs of Leonardo da Vinci and technological advances such as 3D printers and computer simulations.

In the late 1480s, Leonardo da Vinci sketched out an ingenious design for a one-person helicopter propelled by a kind of wing/screw. You may have seen his drawings and wondered if such a drone could take flight.

As of 2019, a team of engineers from the University of Maryland designed and tested the technology underlying as part of a design contest (although not as original as this other design).

Following the contest, and over the past year and a half, team member Austin Prete built Crimson Spin, an unmanned quadcopter drone that uses da Vinci’s bolt-on design, and made it fly several times.

He and other members of the team were initially skeptical, but became enthusiastic about da Vinci’s design. after some computer simulations and 3D printed prototypes showed promising results.

The project it’s a good example of how current technology is moving away from conventional airplane and helicopter design, though it’s highly unlikely that a 15th-century flying corkscrew will be delivering an Amazon package anytime soon.

Although Prete only built a small drone, the technology could work with a plane big enough to carry a human. “I think it should be able to scale pretty well“, he says.

Building materials from the Renaissance era, such as wood and leather, are too dense and heavy for flying objects. Instead, Prete had access to aluminum, plastic, electric motors, batteries, and computer control systems.

They were also helpful computer aided design and computational fluid dynamics software which Prete used to design prototypes and simulate aerodynamics inside a computer.

Today’s quadcopter technology also helped make the design practical. Since these are directed by subtle changes in the speed of the propellers that tilt the aircraft to one side or the other. More than 500 years later we can say that Leonardo da Vinci was right, again.