It's hard to tell the difference between this robot and a fruit fly



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Humans can worry about robots taking their jobs, but you know who else should start taking the robots seriously now? Fruit flies. If you have heard of a new robotic creation by researchers from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

The team has developed an agile four-wing beat robot that can perform the same type of movement as its live counterpart. This is the newest robot of DelFly robots created by researchers.

"Our previous DelFly robots had a plane-like tail, which made it stable and used as a steering wheel," said Matěj Karásek, who led the work, at Digital Trends. "Fruit flies, but also other insects, do not have such a tail, instead they control their flight in [their] flapping their wings. The DelFly Nimble does the same: it uses its swinging wings not only to produce a lift 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 placed on the robot allow him to control three axes of flight. With their help, he is able to perform movements like a 360-degree volley. The robot can only fly five minutes from now. This certainly limits the robot's usefulness, but with appropriate improvements, this could be changed in the coming days.

"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 said. "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, believes that flying wing propulsion will facilitate the miniaturization of multi-purpose flying robots in the future. He imagines "swarms of tiny, fully autonomous robots pollinating plants in greenhouses or looking for survivors in collapsed buildings after earthquakes".

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