A team of engineers at Harvard University created the first robotic fly. Designed to do what a fly does naturally, the tiny machine is the size of a fat housefly. Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.
"The added difficulty with a project like this is that actually none of its components is off the shelf and so we have to develop them all on our own," said Robert Wood, a Harvard engineering professor.
They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. "The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has lots of interdependence(互相依赖) of the individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, but then has to be matched well to everything it's connected to, " said Wood.
While this first robotic flyer is linked to a small, off-board power source, the goal is eventually to equip it with a built-in power source, so that it might someday perform data-gathering work at rescue sites, in farmers' fields or on the battlefield. "Basically it should be able to take off, land and fly around," he said.
Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect-scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications. "You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animals, but using these robots instead, " he said. "So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day-to-day basis."
