Researchers from New York University create a tiny robot that flies, not like any traditional flying creature, but like a jellyfish.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see a jellyfish fly? Well! You might just be in luck with a New York University creation, reveals a recent press release.
Researchers from Lehigh University in Bethlehem recently conducted a study that revealed how insects fly which could prove helpful for scientists creating flying robots. The study revealed that flying creatures like the small fly are inherently unstable. They need to have a lot of fine control to maintain their stability. Therefore, their brains are loaded with some pretty sophisticated systems that help them keep their body under control. Replicating this system and embedding them in a device the size of a fly can be quite a challenging task. Therefore, Leif Ristroph of New York University thought up a new way to use jellyfish movements in his recently created tiny robot.
"Our [robot] is an aerial jellyfish if you will," Ristroph, assistant professor of mathematics at NYU who designed the tiny machine, told NBC News. "No one's ever built this, and as far as we know nature never built it either to fly in air. Maybe that indicates that it's a bad idea? In any case we got it to work, so maybe not that bad."
Discovery News reveals that the newly created robot flies by flapping its wings that are arranged around the robot's "waist." The wings move up and down and it looks like a jellyfish, though strictly speaking the aerodynamics is probably a bit more like a moth.
The robot is only about 4 inches tall and weighs just about 2gms. The robot is yet to be fully autonomous. Currently, it is attached to a tether as it hasn't got its own power source. Ristroph claims that because the robot doesn't have its own power source, he was able to design it in such a small size. However, he does plan on working on making more autonomous 'bots, and smaller ones, that can fly around and squeeze into small spaces.
The longstanding goal for researchers has been to shrink flying robots down to the size of a centimeter, allowing them to squeeze into small spaces and fly around undetected. The simpler, the better.
"And ours is one of the simplest, in that it just uses flapping wings," Ristroph concluded, according to Science Codex.
