WASHINGTON: Harvard researchers have successfully designed, manufactured and flown a tiny fly-inspired aerial robot. The demonstration of the first controlled flight of an insect-sized
robot is the culmination of more than a decade's work, led by
researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
(SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at
Harvard. "This is what I have been trying to do for literally
the last 12 years," said Robert J Wood, principal investigator of the
National Science Foundation-supported RoboBee project. Inspired by the
biology of a fly, with submillimeter-scale anatomy and two wafer-thin
wings that flap almost invisibly, 120 times per second, the tiny device
not only represents the absolute cutting edge of micromanufacturing and
control systems. "We had to develop solutions from scratch, for
everything. We would get one component working, but when we moved onto
the next, five new problems would arise. It was a moving target," said
Wood. Flight muscles, for instance, don't come prepackaged for robots
the size of a fingertip. "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," said co-lead author Kevin Y Ma, a
graduate student at SEAS. The tiny robot flaps its wings with
piezoelectric actuators - strips of ceramic that expand and contract
when an electric field is applied =================================================
Did Obama have to swat that fly?OR
Fly-sized robot FIRST TRIAL
By Associated PressPublished: Jun 17, 2009 at 8:53 PM PDTLast Updated: Jun 18, 2009 at 6:55 AM PDT
This image made from video
released by CNBC, shows President Barack Obama getting ready to smack a
fly dead during an interview with CNBC correspondent John Harwood in the
White House on Tuesday June 16, 2009 in Washington. (AP Photo/Courtesy
CNBC)
WASHINGTON (AP) - The group
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants the flyswatter in
chief to try taking a more humane attitude the next time he's bedeviled
by a fly in the White House.
PETA is sending President Barack Obama a Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catcher, a
device that allows users to trap a house fly and then release it
outside.
"We support compassion even for the most curious, smallest and least
sympathetic animals," PETA spokesman Bruce Friedrich said Wednesday. "We
believe that people, where they can be compassionate, should be, for
all animals."
During an interview for CNBC at the White House on Tuesday, a fly
intruded on Obama's conversation with correspondent John Harwood.
"Get out of here," the president told the pesky insect. When it didn't,
he waited for the fly to settle, put his hand up and then smacked it
dead.
"Now, where were we?" Obama asked Harwood. Then he added: "That was pretty impressive, wasn't it? I got the sucker."
Friedrich said that PETA was pleased with Obama's voting record in the
Senate on behalf of animal rights and noted that he has been outspoken
against animal abuses.
Still, "swatting a fly on TV indicates he's not perfect," Friedrich said, "and we're happy to say that we wish he hadn't."
Deputy press secretary Josh Earnest said the White House has no comment on the matter
Flies have tiny wings and even tinier brains, yet they are capable of
flying swiftly and agilely through even turbulent air. How do they do
it?
And could we create a robot capable of doing the same?
That's the question that's been buzzing around Harvard professor Robert
Wood's head for 12 years now. And finally, after years of testing and
the invention of an all-new manufacturing technique inspired by
children's pop-up books, Wood and his team at the Wyss Institute for
Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have created a
robot the size of a penny that is capable of remote-controlled flight.
You'd think that the smaller something is, the easier it'd be to make.
But there's a point at which making things smaller becomes harder rather
than easier, which is why making a functional fly-sized robot has
proved such a challenge.
The so-called RoboBee flaps its wings approximately 120 times per
second, almost faster than the eye can track, and is capable of hovering
and flying horizontally in multiple directions like a helicopter.
At 80 milligrams, which is less than one-twentieth the weight of a
dime, the robot is so small that traditional components of
flight-capable machines simply wouldn't work, so the team had to create
new ones.
"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,"
Kevin Ma, a co-lead author and graduate student at Harvard's School of
Engineering and Applied Sciences, said in a statement.
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In place of electromagnetic motors, the team used ceramic strips that
can expand or contract when hit with an electric field, a technique
known as piezoelectricity. [See also: Touch Tech Could Make Robots Ticklish]
The problem of building these parts at a fly-sized scale was also an
enormous obstacle. For example, the robot has no onboard power source —
instead, it receives electricity via a thin wire connected to an
external battery.
To build the other parts, the team looked for inspiration not from the
natural world, but from children's pop-up books and origami.
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Their solution is a groundbreaking technique that involves layering and
folding sheets of carbon fiber, brass, ceramic and other materials, and
then using extremely precise lasers to cut these sheets into structures
and circuits. After that, the sheets can be assembled into extremely
small but entirely functional devices in a single movement, just like a
children's pop-up book.
Wood and his team devised the pop-up technique in 2011, publishing a
paper on it in February 2012. And last summer, after years of failed
prototypes, the first RoboBee took flight in a Harvard robotics lab at 3
a.m.
The RoboBee is the smallest flight-capable robot to date.
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