Scientists from Ivy Leaguer Harvard have engineered an incredibly tiny fly robot with some nifty aerobatics, and it's finally taken flight.
The pint-sized flybot tips the scale at a mere 80 milligrams and is half the size of a paper clip with a wingspan of little over an inch. Its almost-invisible wings flap a whopping 120 times per second.
"This is what I have been trying to do for literally the last 12 years," says professor Robert J. Wood, Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "It's really only because of this lab's recent breakthroughs in manufacturing, materials, and design that we have even been able to try this. And it just worked, spectacularly well."
Of course, designing such a petite robot poses a number of challenges. Since it's hard to come by motorized wings at such a scale, the team used tiny strips of ceramic called piezoelectric actuators which expand and contract in response to an electrical field. For the robot's structure, Woods and his colleagues utilized a "pop-up" manufacturing process, where the design is etched by laser onto a flat plate that can fold up into the desired 3-D shape, much like a children's book of the same variety.
The quick-and-easy manufacturing process meant the researchers could test multiple flybots - as many as 20 in six months - and come up with a working prototype.
Woods and his team hope that the the flybot can eventually be utilized for environmental monitoring, search-and-rescue operations, and crop pollution, according to Harvard.
It doesn't end with just one bug, however. Other teams of researchers are currently working on an portable power source and colony coordination behavior, so that these little buggers can buzz around on their own, and undertake missions autonomously.
"This project provides a common motivation for scientists and engineers across the University to build smaller batteries, to design more efficient control systems, and to create stronger, more lightweight materials," Wood explained.
"You might not expect all of these people to work together: vision experts, biologists, materials scientists, electrical engineers. What do they have in common? Well, they all enjoy solving really hard problems."
You can read the full published study detailing the project online in the journal Science.