An incredibly acrobatic winged robot flying like a fruit fly

Humans may have to worry about robots taking their jobs, but you know who else should probably watch their backs? Fruit flies! At least if you start a new robotic creation of researchers from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. They built an extremely agile four-wing beating robot, which can present the same type of winged movement as its insect-inspired. This is the last robot of a series of robots called DelFly, created by researchers, but with a very important aspect.

"Our old DelFly robots had a plane-like tail, which made it stable and used for management," said Matěj Karásek, who led the work, at Digital Trends. "Fruit flies, but also other insects, do not have this tail. Instead, they control their flight by adjusting the movements of [their] flapping their wings. The DelFly Nimble does the same thing: it uses its swinging wings not only to produce a lifting force that keeps it flying, but also to control it. The loss of tail makes it much more agile, like flying insects.

The four wings of DelFly allow him to control three axes of flight. Thanks to them, he is able to express dazzling movements like a fly, and even a 360-degree flip. Right now he can fly only about five minutes. This limits its usefulness, but with the appropriate amendments, it may well change in the future.

"Currently, the robot can already carry a small camera, sending live images to the operator, and can fly for more than one kilometer when it is fully charged," Karásek continued. "We are already working to make the drone totally autonomous by adding a camera system as in our previous DelFly Explorer."

Guido de Croon, another researcher on the project, said the propulsion of the swing wing developed by the team will make it easier to miniaturize multi-purpose flying robots in the future. De Croon imagines "swarms of these tiny, fully autonomous robots pollinating plants in greenhouses or looking for survivors in collapsed buildings after earthquakes."

It's totally out of reach for now, but even if it's just a technical demonstration of the power of biomimicry, the last DelFly is pretty impressive in itself.

An article describing the work was recently published in the journal Science.