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Insect or Robot?
Kevin Chen, Harvard Microbiotics Laboratory (drones)
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently invented a flying robot that’s so small, you might mistake it for a bug. It weighs 0.02 ounces, about the heft of a paper clip, and has tiny wings reminiscent of a dragonfly’s. Those wings flap almost 500 times per second, helping the drone move just like a real fly, so it’s extra-resilient against gusts of wind or other obstacles. “You can hit it when it’s flying, and it can recover,” says Kevin Chen, who led the team of researchers. “It can also do aggressive maneuvers like somersaults in the air.” Chen is still perfecting the design, but he hopes that one day the microdrones will be used to help pollinate crops, inspect complex machinery, or search for missing people after a disaster such as a building collapse. “All those things can be very challenging for existing large-scale robots,” Chen says.