About five years ago, a bizarre idea occurred to me. At the time, I was designing complex electronic circuits to mimic a small portion of an insect brain. These circuits would be created on a tiny ...

The compound eyes of the humble fruit fly are a marvel of nature. They are wide-angle and can process visual information ...

In an age of increasingly advanced robotics, one team has well and truly bucked the trend, instead finding inspiration within the pinhead-sized brain of a tiny flying insect in order to build a robot ...

Tiny robots inspired by insects could soon glide across water, scouting flooded areas, monitoring pollutants, or collecting samples, thanks to a breakthrough in soft robotics. Researchers at the ...

Insect-scale robots can squeeze into places their larger counterparts can't, like deep into a collapsed building to search for survivors after an earthquake. However, as they move through the rubble, ...

(Nanowerk Spotlight) Building robots that can effortlessly mimic the movements of insects on water has been a persistent challenge in robotics. The ability to move autonomously and efficiently in ...

Kaushik Jayaram envisions a day when swarms of tiny robots, some weighing no more than a paperclip, will crawl through airplanes or into buildings after an earthquake—searching for survivors or ...

Credit: TU Delft/Studio Oostrum/Tom van Dijk/Christophe de Wagter/Cover Images Scientists believe insects could hold the key to a world where futuristic mini-robots can complete important tasks.

Bees navigate long distances without satellites, digital maps, or external guidance. By reading patterns ...

Sean Humbert is unlocking the biological secrets of the common housefly to make major advances in robotics and uncrewed aerial systems (UAS). A professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical ...

Credit: TU Delft/Studio Oostrum/Tom van Dijk/Christophe de Wagter/Cover Images Scientists believe insects could hold the key to a world where futuristic mini-robots can complete important tasks.