Flies and bees make it look so easy as they hover and swoop, buzzing away expertly from any paltry human’s attempts to shoo them out a window or door. Building a similar-sized robot that can perform tricks such as vertical take-off, hovering and steering is seemingly not so easy, yet that’s what researchers at Harvard have managed, using some clever folding tricks along the way.
To make parts of the the biologically inspired, insect-scale robot, the researchers engineered layers of flat materials so they could pop up into more three-dimensional structures. The resulting robot, which is dubbed RoboBee, has a wing-span of 3 centimetres and can flap its polyester and carbon wings around 120 times per second - but powering the activity at that tiny scale took some ingenuity.
"Large robots can run on electromagnetic motors, but at this small scale you have to come up with an alternative, and there wasn't one," co-lead study author Kevin Y Ma told the Harvard Gazette .
That alternative involved tethering the tiny robot to a power source and using piezoelectric actuators that expand and contract to get the wings flapping.
Thus fired up, RoboBee was able to demonstrate "tethered but unconstrained stable hovering and basic controlled flight manoeuvres," write the authors in the journal Science .
The model is still connected to a wire, through which the power and controls can be sent. Getting the tiny robots to move wirelessly would require innovations in battery technology and control systems.
Watch the Robobee in flight by clicking here
