{"id":34163,"date":"2019-07-01T04:11:05","date_gmt":"2019-07-01T04:11:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ismartnetwork.co.uk\/?p=34163"},"modified":"2019-07-01T04:11:05","modified_gmt":"2019-07-01T04:11:05","slug":"tiny-robobee-x-wing-powers-its-flight-with-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ismartnetwork.co.uk\/?p=34163","title":{"rendered":"Tiny Robobee X-Wing powers its flight with light"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve seen Harvard’s Robobee flying robot evolve for years: After first study to fly, it learned to swim<\/a> in 2015, then to jump out of the sea again<\/a> in 2017 — and now it has another trick up its non-existent sleeve. The Robobee X-Wing can fly employing merely the power it collects from light hitting its solar cell, establishing it possible to stay in the air indefinitely.<\/p>\n

Achieving flight at this scale is extremely hard. You might think that being small-scale, it would be easy to take off and maintain flight, like an insect does. But self-powered flight actually gets much harder the smaller, which sets insects among the most bafflingly marvelous accomplishments of engineering “weve had” encountered in nature.<\/p>\n

Oh, it’s easy enough to fly when you have a wire feeding you electricity to strength a pair of tiny wings — and that’s how the Robobee and others flied before. It’s only very recently that researchers have accomplished meaningful flight using on-board power<\/a> or, in one case, a laser zapping an attached solar panel<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Watch a laser-powered RoboFly flap its tiny wings<\/a><\/p>\n