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Despite superior individual components, robots lag behind animals in overall performance, suggesting a future focus on better system integration and control in robotics. Robotics engineers have worked for decades and invested many millions of research dollars in attempts to create a robot that ca
Swatting a mosquito is a frustrating task as it buzzes away, its wings carrying it faster than seems physically possible. Amidst the vast animal kingdom, insects have evolved and maintained flight across the greatest number of species, making them the most successful—and in some ways, the most mysterious. Biologists know that insects evolved two modes […]
Some insects' wings flap without brain input. Robots help us understand how.
<p>Robots built by engineers at the University of California San Diego helped achieve a major breakthrough in understanding how insect flight evolved, described in the Oct. 4, 2023 issue of the journal <em>Nature</em>. The study is a result of a six-year long collaboration between roboticists at UC San Diego and biophysicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology. </p> <p><br /> </p>
Researchers built tiny robots that can switch between two different kinds of flight, one involving unusually fast wing-flapping, to better understand insect evolution