Insect-sized robots could fly into the sites of recent earthquakes, floods, or other such disasters to help locate trapped survivors.After a decade of work, a team of engineers has built one of the smallest aerial drones yet. The RoboBee is about the size of a fly, and just like a fly, it flaps a pair of wings to lift off the ground, dart through the air in several directions, land, and take off again.
Robert Wood, a mechanical engineer at Harvard University, built the RoboBee with Harvard grad student Kevin Ma and several colleagues by layering a flat sheet of carbon fiber materials and polymer films, and then using a laser to cut scaffolding and other designs into the sheet. They applied some delicate finishing touches with a pair of tweezers under a microscope. In all, the production took about two days.
Guidance and electrical power come in through an attached tether, flight directions transmitting in from a computer on the ground. To flap the wings, the robot’s ceramic “muscles” bend when an electrical current hits them. According to Vijay Kumar, a University of Pennsylvania mechanical engineer who was not a part of the project, the RoboBee is the smallest flapping-wing aircraft that anyone has successfully built and operated.
Ma hopes to further work the robot into a tether-less flying machine that will run with its own on-board power source and sensors. His goal is to achieve this by the time he graduates, which is only two years away.
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