5 days Ago
Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed the world's smallest wireless flying robot, weighing just 21 milligrams and measuring less than a centimeter in diameter. This tiny robot could one day be used to pollinate crops. This tiny robot, inspired by the flight of bumble bees, looks like a small propeller equipped with two magnets.
Because it actually has no motor! By applying an external magnetic field, the magnets cause the propeller to rotate, causing it to fly. By modulating the intensity of the magnetic field, it becomes possible to control the flight path. However, the problem is that the robot is so light and difficult to control that it is very sensitive to environmental disturbances, such as wind and rain.
The researchers are therefore aiming to develop active control that would allow for modifying the root's orientation and position in real time, thus improving its stability and precision. This project, described in a paper in Science Advances , represents a significant step in the development of autonomous miniature robots, paving the way for new applications in fields such as agriculture and industrial inspection. Looking to the future, researchers are considering several uses for this miniature robot, starting with artificial pollination.
An army of micro robots could, for example, imitate the behaviour of pollinating insects by moving from flower to flower. Their ultra-small size could also enable them to explore confined environments, such as inside pipes or cavities that are usually extremely difficult to reach. In the same vein, researchers at Northwest University in Washington have been working on tiny flying microchips that, when dispersed in the air from a high elevation, could help monitor the development of pollution or certain diseases in predefined areas.
Here too, we are talking about very small flying structures, equipped with miniature legs made of biodegradable materials, but this time equipped with sensors capable of providing very useful environmental measurements, whether it be analyzing the quality of the air or water, but also detecting the presence of viruses, etc. For the moment, this project is still in the laboratory phase, but it appears very promising. It is not only in the United States that "biorobots” are popular.
In Japan, tiny robots in the shape of cockroaches have been designed to be able to move in any natural environment inaccessible to humans, to inspect the quality of the environment using various sensors placed on them. – AFP Relaxnews.
