Because of its light-weight property, if modified with a set of three foot-like appendages it can land on water surfaces. "It can also move and steer on the ground by making use of the same set of flapping wings. "RoboFly makes use of its two flapping wings driven by piezoelectric actuators to fly and hover, like some insects do," Chukewad said. The chassis is also lower and thus closer to the ground, which enables three different types of locomotion. One can thus build the robot without having to assemble many microscopic parts. To simplify RoboFly's fabrication, the researchers created a new design, in which the robot's chassis is comprised of a single, folded laminate sheet. If you accidentally drop a part the size of a sesame seed in a busy lab, you're never going to see it again!"
"Currently, most insect-size robots are built under a microscope, assembled carefully by hand, as they have many separate microscopic parts. "The way RoboBee was designed made it really difficult to build," Chukewad explained. A key improvement of RoboFly is that it has fewer components, as the researchers found that assembling too many parts made its fabrication overly complex. The tiny robot created by Chukewad and his colleagues is an adaptation of RoboBee, a flying micro-robot prototype that Sawyer Fuller, senior author and principal investigator on the study, helped to develop at Harvard University before he started working at the University of Washington. The goal of our research was to develop a robot that mimics its biological counterpart by performing multi-modal locomotion, which includes aerial, ground, and water surface locomotion." "These insects can fly, walk, and some of them can also skim on the water surface. "RoboFly is a flapping-wing micro-robot inspired by flying insects," Yogesh Chukewad, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. The new robot, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, was built using fewer components than those generally used to build insect-size robots, which greatly simplifies its fabrication. To overcome these limitations, researchers at the University of Washington have recently created RoboFly, a 74-mg flapping-wing robot that can move in the air, on the ground and on water surfaces.
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