Meet RoboBee: A Robot that can Swim and Fly
BANGALORE: Scientists have come up with a robot that looks like an insect and has a size smaller than a paperclip for the first time. Interestingly, this machine, named RoboBee, can swim and fly introducing a breakthrough invention leading to the dual aerial aquatic robotic vehicles, reports NDTV.
However, the glitch in the design is the requirements. Aerial aquatic robotic vehicles require large airfoils to acts as wing or sail to enable the flight whereas for underwater operations the surface area should be minimum.
Engineers at the Harvard University's John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) came up with a solution to this comparing the robot with a puffin.
Similar to the bird, the robot would use flapping motions of the wings to traverse through both air and water.
"Through various theoretical, computational and experimental studies, we found that the mechanics of flapping propulsion are actually very similar in air and in water," said Kevin Chen, a graduate student at the Harvard Microrobotics Lab at SEAS.
The microbot have been designed in the lab owned by Robert J Wood, a postdoctoral fellow. The insect looking robot is as small as paperclip and can flap it nearly invisible wings at the speed of 120 times in a second.
As this is a dual aerial aquatic robot, the team had to overcome the problem of surface tension in the first place. The RoboBee has been designed so lightweight that it cannot break the surface of the water.
To meet this problem, the RoboBee takes up a position in a specific angle before touching the surface of the water. It, then, switches the wings off for a moment to land on the surface of the water to sink within. Once the robot makes it to the water, it then needs to tackle the increased density of the water.
"Water is almost 1,000 times denser than air and would snap the wing off the RoboBee if we didn't adjust its flapping speed," said graduate student Farrell Helbling, the paper's second author.
Slight changes in the design have been made where the wing flapping speed has been lowered to 9 times keeping the rest of the design same.
Directions are changed in water and air by the angular movement and strokes of the wings.
Scientists are still working on the design to make the transition from the water to air seamless.
Read More: 6 Things To Know About YouTube's New Subscription Service
