Saturday, October 30, 2010

Airborne Robots



The little device at the left is a mock-up of an ambitious project at UC Berkeley to develop an artificial fly. If you ask me, they don't have a chance of succeeding. The challenges are just too great. They need to get the tiny wings flapping at 150 times per second, there needs to be some means of keeping the system stable in the air and somehow it has to navigate. And all this on something the size of a dime. They have gotten one wing to flap fast enough that, if they mount it on a little wire boom, it will generate some thrust. In other words they are nowhere close after years of work. This may be the type of system that can only be developed via evolution.

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