Fluttering robotic insects could be coming to your neighborhood



SEATTLE -- It's not science fiction. A team of engineers at the University of Washington has created an insect-sized robot that mimics real flies.

They hope the tiny robots could help with time-consuming tasks like surveying crop growth on large farms or sniffing out gas leaks.

"You could buy a suitcase full of them, open it up, and they would fly around your building looking for plumes of gas coming out of leaky pipes," said Sawyer Fuller, an assistant professor in the UW Department of Mechanical Engineering.

"If these robots can make it easy to find leaks, they will be much more likely to be patched up, which will reduce greenhouse emissions."

These flying robots, officially called RoboFly, work similar to drones with a few differences:

1. A lot smaller: RoboFly are slightly heavier than a toothpick.

2. They have wings: RoboFly is too small to use propellers, so in an engineering feat the UW team created the flapping wings which look and act like a real insect.

3. It has a brain: RoboFly uses a tiny onboard circuit that converts energy from a tiny laser into electricity to operate its wings.