Engineers Used Leonardo Da Vinci's 500-Year-Old Sketches to Build a Drone ... and It Worked!

Italian genius and renaissance icon Leonardo da Vinci in 1483 made one of the earliest drawings of a rotor-driven aircraft propelled by an "aerial-screw" or "air gyroscope". The Italian was a painter, an engineer, and a scientist, among many things. The Mona Lisa and The Last Supper are among his masterpieces.

A team of engineers at the University of Maryland were so inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's design for a helicopter that they used his 500-year-old sketches to develop a functional drone for a flight design contest.

Since 2019, the crew has been working on the aircraft, with Austin Prete - a member of the engineering team - submitting its first rendition, called Elico, in 2020. Coincidentally it was on the 500th anniversary of Da Vinci's death, and the team won first prize for their design.

However, dissatisfied with the work, Prete spent about 15 more months on developing Crimson Spin, a quadcopter drone that shares more aspects of Leonardo's original design.

Crimson Spin is a small unmanned quadcopter drone with wings inspired by Leonardo's “aerial screw” design. It used an Archimedean screw to expel air and obtain flight.

Un drone inspiré directement de Leonard de Vinci. Les ingénieurs du Maryland ont donné vie au projet fou de vis aérienne imaginée par Léonard de Vinci dessinée à la fin du XVe siècle avec ses hélices hélicoïdales... pic.twitter.com/paPZVQIfXq

— TRIGGER 🐯⚜ (@TriggerOG) February 1, 2022

"The drone has four corkscrew-shaped wings made of plastic, but instead of having someone hand spin (or pump) them as Leonardo proposed, these wings are powered by batteries and electric motors," leading tech news website, CNET, reported.

The team also introduced a few changes to the drone, for instance to the propeller speed to tilt in one direction or the other.

"I was absolutely surprised, it worked," Prete was quoted by CNET as saying.

Even though the drone built by Prete is rather small, it could be scaled up to a giant size capable of carrying human beings, Prete said while presenting his results and the first video of the aircraft flying, at the Transformative Vertical Flight 2022 conference in San Jose, California, last week.