Robotic insects make first controlled flight
Last summer, in a Harvard robotics laboratory, an insect took flight. Half the size of a paper clip, weighing less than a tenth of a gram, it leapt a few inches, hovered for a moment on fragile, flapping wings, and then sped along a preset route through the air. Like a proud parent watching a child take its first steps, graduate student Pakpong Chirarattananon immediately captured a video of the fledgling and emailed it to his adviser and colleagues at 3 a.m. — subject line: “Flight of the RoboBee.” “I was so excited, I couldn’t sleep,” recalls Chirarattananon, co-lead author of a paper published this week in Science. The demonstration of the first controlled flight of an insect-sized robot is the culmination of more than a decade’s work, led by researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. “This is what...