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 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.
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