April 2014, Motion Control & Drives: April 15 2014
Read the full article at: http://www.instrumentation.co.za/48420n
Harvard researchers have demonstrated the first controlled flight of an insect-sized robot. Half the size of a paperclip and weighing less than a tenth of a gram, it can leap a few inches, hover for a moment on fragile, flapping wings, and then speed along a preset route through the air.
With two wafer-thin wings that flap almost invisibly, 120 times per second, the tiny device represents the absolute cutting edge of micro manufacturing and control systems. Flight muscles, for instance, don’t come pre-packaged 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,” says Professor Robert Wood, principal investigator at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).
Flies are among the most agile flying creatures on earth. To mimic this aerial prowess in a similarly sized robot required tiny, high-efficiency mechanical components that posed miniaturisation challenges requiring unconventional solutions for propulsion, actuation, and manufacturing. Other researchers have built robots that mimic insects, but this is the first two-winged robot built on such a small scale that can take off using the same motions as a real fly. The dynamics of such flight are very complicated.
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