The Human-Powered Ornithopter (HPO) Project is part of a student organization at the University of Toronto that is focused on the design and construction of innovative, high-performance, human-powered vehicles. Our goal is to provide students with practical hands on experience in engineering design while at the same time promoting efficiency, sustainability, and the use of human-power as a means of reducing society’s impact on the environment. The HPO Project seeks to achieve one of humanity’s oldest dreams with the successful flight of a human-powered, flapping-wing aircraft, the last of the aviation firsts.
The HPO project started in the summer of 2006 as a spin-off of the flapping-wing research being conducted at the University of Toronto. The team is made up of a dedicated, energetic group of graduate and undergraduate engineering students either working on a thesis project or volunteering their time outside of the classroom. An advisory board of experienced aerospace engineers, including successful ornithopter designer Prof. James DeLaurier, will also be lending their expertise to the project. Finally, the team is collaborating with Dutch rowingbike designer Derk Thys, who brings to the project more than twenty years of experience in the design of efficient rowing mechanisms, which will be used in the HPO to transmit power from the pilot to the wings.
The specific goal of the project is the successful flight of a human-powered ornithopter around the one-mile benchmark Kremer Figure-of-Eight course by the summer of 2009. As with the first successful propeller-driven human-powered aircraft in 1977, the completion of the figure-of-eight course will be sure to capture the hearts and minds of the international community, bringing this age-old dream into reality.
