Flying insects are a pain this time of year, but Harvard researchers couldn’t be happier about the bug buzzing around their lab. A study published in Science today announced the world’s first controlled flight of an insect-size robot, the result of a decade-long project by the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.
Modeled after a housefly, the tiny robot weighs less than a tenth of a gram and is about half the size of a paperclip. Its two delicate wings can flap independently at up to 120 times per second. At that speed they’re barely even visible to the human eye.
via Popular Mechanics
