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California scientists build a robot fly 
Wednesday, June 05 2002
by Matthew Clark


Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley are on the verge of
building a tiny robotic insect that has to ability to fly, just like the real
thing.

The university said this week that it had made a breakthrough on the new robot by
creating a wing similar to a housefly's wing, which can generate lift.  When
completed, the flying robot will be around the size of a two euro coin. The wings
themselves are about half an inch long, 1/20th the thickness of a sheet of paper
and look similar to miniature paddles.  



The bug will rest on a tripod of solar panels to power it, but are light enough
to allow the robot to gain lift. Its polyester wings are attached to thin but
strong stainless steel struts, giving them the capacity to flap, rotate and do
complicated aerobatics, such as land on a ceiling. The end goal of the project is
to have, by the end of 2003, a robot weighing a tenth of a gram  (or around the
same as paper clip) that can lift off the ground and hover.







"The complicated thing for us has been to build a wing mechanism which can both
flap and rotate simultaneously at 150 times per second, the same speed as a fly's
wings beat," said Ronald Fearing, professor of electrical engineering at UC
Berkeley and the principal investigator for the project. "What we've shown is
that we've got force in at least one direction, which is an important
milestone."





Fearing calls the proposed bug a micromechanical flying insect or MFI and the
university's researchers believe that if its fully developed, MFI could be used
in search and rescue or reconnaissance missions. There are hopes that small
sensors, communications units or cameras could eventually be mounted on the MFI
so it can go places too dangerous to send people or animals.





"There's a big gap between the traditionally engineered robot, which is very
slow, heavy, dangerous and expensive, and what nature builds, which is
lightweight, fast, high-performance and very robust," he said. "It's these
capabilities of natural systems that we wanted to capture in a mechanical
system." 





The project, which was first started in 1998, is funded by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency and the US Office of Naval Research. Some of the
research the project is based on has been accomplished by Michael Dickinson, also
a professor at UC Berkeley, who made recent discoveries about the way flies flap
their wings.