The fly!

The guys at Harvard have created a robotic fly.

Seriously!

That is undoubtedly so very cool. We can, of course, also trust that it will be used for all kinds of nice things to benefit mankind. Right! In any case, the future is certainly going to get interesting with the usoA, the Chinese, the Russians and pretty soon everybody launching cute little things like that (and who knows what else) at each other.

"The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding Wood's research in the hope that it will lead to stealth surveillance robots for the battlefield and urban environments. The robot's small size and fly-like appearance are critical to such missions. "You probably wouldn't notice a fly in the room, but you certainly would notice a hawk," Wood says.

Recreating a fly's efficient movements in a robot roughly the size of the real insect was difficult, however, because existing manufacturing processes couldn't be used to make the sturdy, lightweight parts required. The motors, bearings, and joints typically used for large-scale robots wouldn't work for something the size of a fly. "Simply scaling down existing macro-scale techniques will not come close to the performance that we need," Wood says.

Some extremely small parts can be made using the processes for creating microelectromechanical systems. But such processes require a lot of time and money. Wood and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, needed a cheap, rapid fabrication process so they could easily produce different iterations of their designs."

Thanks go to Theodore for that one.

Source: MIT's TechnologyReview