Insect-inspired flying robot uses flapping wings to mimic rapid animal flight

Where flying insect robots have already been made, a team of scientists are now building a flying robot with flapping wings to imitate flying animals’ rapid flight.

A team of Dutch scientists from the Delft University of Technology have built are a flying robot named DelFly Nimble that can fly around like a winged animal with its flappy wings.

The robot is the size of a ping-pong ball and weighs a bit more than a double-A battery. DelFly uses four flapping wings to hover around for five minutes on a single charge, flying over a kilometer with about 15mph before running out of juice.

First wireless flying robotic insect takes its initial flight

The creators claimed that they can program it to mimic the flapping patterns of various winged animals like flies, beetles, hummingbirds, bats and such, and how they navigate their surroundings, in turn helping researchers gain more information about animals’ flight.

Apart from hovering, the robot can also smoothly perform different kinds of motions including taking a dive, dart left or right, 360-degree flips and roll, wrote Daily Mail.

Video Courtesy: MAVLab TU Delft

The researchers also stated that their created robot is different from the already existing ones since it can fly autonomously, and does not need a tethered power supply. For carrying out the test, the DelFly was programmed replicate the common fruit fly, which can perform rapid banked turns to avoid predators.

“In contrast to animal experiments, we were in full control of what was happening in the robot’s ‘brain.’ This allowed us to identify and describe a new passive aerodynamic mechanism that assists the flies, but possibly also other flying animals, in steering their direction throughout these rapid banked turns,” lead researcher Mat?j Karásek explained in their study published in the journal Science.

The team said that with this experiment, they gained new knowledge about fruit flies’ rapid evasion maneuvers and for the future, they hope it will help scientists better know how different animals fly and can also let engineers design better human-sized aircraft, as per Futurism.