This Four-Wing Flying Robot Are Smaller Than A Penny

In the near future, humans may not be able to distinguish the flying insects around us being animals or robots. Typically, Bee+ is a flying robot with four wings, has a footprint smaller than a coin, and weighs 95 grams. It was developed by a team of engineers from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

This is not the first insect-like flying robot invention. In 2013, RoboBee was built by researchers at Harvard University. It's even lighter and smaller than Bee+ when it only has about 75 grams.

What makes RoboBee difficult to control and erratic is its two wings. Therefore, the research team from University of Southern California equipped the Bee+ with 4 wings in order to easily control its direction and height during flight.

The four-wing design for the Bee+ makes them easier to control but more difficult to regulate weight. The more wings there are, the more actuators. This makes the robot's weight heavier and harder to fly. Therefore, researchers have come up with a completely new design. They use a strip of piezoelectric material that shrinks and expands when current flows through. This helps reduce the weight of four actuators by half.

The team told MIT Technology Review that these new approaches will bring more advantages in size, weight, and aerodynamics to make manufacturing and control easier. A reprint of the Bee+ study has been published to the preprint repository arXiv.

A setback of both Bee+ and RoboBee is that they are not drones. That means they are still connected to the wire for energy. However, until the day battery technology caught up with nano-sized robot technology, Bee+ could fly by itself without any wired connection.