RoboBee X-Wing

RoboBee X-Wing

• The Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory in Cambridge has claimed to have made possible the “lightest insect-scale aerial vehicle so far to have achieved sustained, untethered flight.
• The robot can sustain a flight for less than a second. It is essentially a flying machine, which can flap its wings 120 times a second and is half the size of a paperclip.
• Initially, the researchers called this lightest centimetre-sized vehicle, “RoboBee”, but with the current advancement which makes it possible for RoboBee to fly untethered, its name has been upgraded to “RoboBee X-Wing”.

Working

• The robot weighs 259 mg and uses 110-120 milliwatts of power using solar energy, matching the “thrust efficiency” of similarly sized insects such as bees.
• Much like aircraft, the robot is heavier than the air it displaces — a concept referred to as “heavier-than-air flight”.
• However, when objects become smaller, achieving a heavier-than-air flight becomes more complicated.

Why make insect like robot?

• Studying the mechanisms that insects use to flap their wings and navigate in the air is a matter of interest to biologists.
• Flapping-wing robots can help in addressing questions related to the evolution of flight, the mechanical basis of natural selection and environmental monitoring.