CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - With a more efficient method for artificial pollination, farmers in the future could grow fruits and vegetables inside multilevel warehouses, boosting yields while mitigating some of agriculture’s harmful impacts on the environment, Adam Zewe writes for MIT News. Continue reading original article.
The Military & Aerospace Electronics take:
22 Jan. 2025 - "The amount of flight we demonstrated in this paper is probably longer than the entire amount of flight our field has been able to accumulate with these robotic insects. With the improved lifespan and precision of this robot, we are getting closer to some very exciting applications, like assisted pollination,” says Kevin Chen, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), head of the Soft and Micro Robotics Laboratory within the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and the senior author of an open-access paper on the new design.
"With a lift-to-weight ratio of 2.2 and a maximum ascending speed of 100 centimeters per second, this robot demonstrated double body flips at a rotational rate exceeding that of the fastest aerial insects and larger MAVs," MIT researchers wrote in the abstract of their research paper, available here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.adp4256. These results highlight insect-like flight endurance, precision, and agility in an at-scale MAV, opening opportunities for future research on sensing and power autonomy.
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Jamie Whitney, Senior Editor
Military + Aerospace Electronics
