Bug-size Robots That Fly And Flip Could Pollinate Futuristic Farms' Crops

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Tiny flying robots could perform such useful tasks as pollinating crops inside multilevel warehouses, boosting yields while mitigating some of agriculture's harmful impacts on the environment. The latest robo-bug from an MIT lab, inspired by the anatomy of the bee, comes closer to matching nature's performance than ever before. 

Led by Kevin Chen, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the senior author of a paper on the work, the team adapted an earlier flying robot composed of four identical two-winged units, combined into a rectangular device about the size of a microcassette. The wings managed to flap like an insect's, but the bot couldn't fly for long. One problem is that the wings would blow air into each other when flapping, reducing the lift forces they could generate.

In the new design, each of the four units has a single flapping wing pointing away from the robot's center, stabilizing the wings and boosting their lift forces. The researchers also improved the way the wings are connected to the actuators, or artificial muscles, that flap them. In previous designs, when the actuators' movements reached the extremely high frequencies needed for flight, the devices often started buckling. That reduced the power and efficiency of the robot. Thanks in part to a new, longer wing hinge, the actuators now experience less mechanical strain and can apply more force, so the bots can fly faster, longer, and in more precise paths.

Weighing less than a paper clip, the new robotic insect can hover for more than 1,000 seconds—almost 17 minutes—without any degradation of flight precision.

"At the end of the day, we've shown flight that is 100 times longer than anyone else in the field has been able to do, so this is an extremely exciting result," Chen says.

From here, he and his students want to see how far they can push this new design, with the goal of achieving flight for longer than 10,000 seconds.

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