Guest Speaker: Robert Wood

Our class attended at talk by Robert Wood on Robotic Insects, or more specifically named Bio-inspired mechanisms for inclined locomotion in a legged insect-scale robot. The talk itself was, admittedly, at a higher level that I could completely understand. Nonetheless, his videos and photos about the insects were beautiful and impressive.

His work is extremely interdisciplinary, as he must question the physics of how insects move to build his robots, and come up with new and innovative ways to design and engineer his micro-robots. As a result of their small size, the design is tedious and the designs can't be quite as daring. He uses pop-up assembly to build his robots. This requires consuming and meticulous design, perfect pin alignment before a final release into the final form of the insect. One limitation of this process is that there are no curved edges-- yet.

He also talked about some of the challenges in the actual movement of the insects. They are working on body torque control, including rolls, pitches, and yaws, which are done by altering the frequency at which the wings flap. The robots are fairly power-efficient although the batteries that they must carry tend to be the heaviest component of the insect.

In his paper, Wood spends a section talking about various adhesives that have been used to attach the insects to walls, including gecko-like dry adhesives, electroadhesion, and micro-spine adhesion. In his paper, he addresses the various pros and cons of each method.

In conclusion, the diversity of backgrounds in the lab are making the flies extremely versatile and beautiful. There is only a but of concern about the applications of the flies. Most likely, the project is funded by the military and the flies will end up serving some sort of military purpose although I think that it would be amazing if the flies could be used to help the environment, doing things suck as pollination, fertilization, and destroying invasive plants.

A video of one fly's flight: