The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding Wood’s research in the hope that it will lead to stealth surveillance robots for the battlefield and urban environments. The robot’s small size and fly-like appearance are critical to such missions. “You probably wouldn’t notice a fly in the room, but you certainly would notice a hawk,” Wood says.
Recreating a fly’s efficient movements in a robot roughly the size of the real insect was difficult, however, because existing manufacturing processes couldn’t be used to make the sturdy, lightweight parts required. The motors, bearings, and joints typically used for large-scale robots wouldn’t work for something the size of a fly. “Simply scaling down existing macro-scale techniques will not come close to the performance that we need,” Wood says.
Cool. How annoying are those pop up ads after you follow the link though? Extremely yucky usability.
Related: Mini Helicopter Masters Insect Navigation Trick – Micromechanical Flying Insect – Robofly– World’s Lightest Flying Robot – Magnificent Flying Machine
Cool, it’s like something off Alias (Jen Garner show). Must be incredibly expensive…
Haha I like your math question spam proofing – there are probably quite a few less mathematically minded people who’ll get it wrong
Oh great, bugs already freak me out, let alone mechanical ones controlled by the government.
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I was present at a recent demonstration for a “micro-bot” by a private contractor. Simply amazing how the flight patterns of the bot accurately mimicked the random directional flight of the real thing.