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PEST
CONTROL
The director of the
Harvard Microrobotics Lab
builds a better housefly.
BY BOB PARKS
A
It’s tempting to see the first-ever flight of a robot insect as a kind of Kitty Hawk moment, clearing the way for all kinds of flying robots, sensor-packing
drones, and surveillance bugs buzzing around our personal airspace.
involves laser-cutting thin sheets of carbon fiber
into 2D patterns, then folding them with tweezers to
create fully 3D mechanisms with moving levers, linkages, and power drives. The Lilliputian devices use
electroactive materials and tiny power converters to
create engines much more powerful than magnetic
motors at this scale, even more powerful than a real
housefly’s thorax.
He explains that other processes wouldn’t work for
his flies. Nanotechnology, which manipulates individual molecules, would produce objects too small
The maiden voyage of the world’s smallest flying
robot occurred in March 2007, while researcher
Robert Wood was pulling a late work session. The
director of the Harvard Microrobotics Lab, Wood
watched as his 60-milligram, 3-centimeter model
rose a few centimeters off the workbench. It was
fixed vertically by two stiff guide wires, and had
hair-like power cords feeding it current. Images
from the high-speed camera footage were broadcast around the world, and Wood earned top honors
including Technology Review magazine’s list of
young innovators under 35.
And yet, as interesting as the flying bug was, it
diminishes Wood’s more wide-ranging accomplishment — that he’s making machines at this scale at
all. Nestled in two small rooms on the Cambridge,
“When we started, we had all these fantastic
ideas about what to do with a swarm of artificial
flies,” says Wood, recalling his first few weeks in grad
school. “We wanted to test various designs, but in
reality, nothing existed on this scale.”
Wood, 32, is soft-spoken and spends his time hovering between the various workstations in the lab in
a neatly ironed dress shirt, jeans, and Doc Martens.
Mass., campus, his team of 20 researchers has
invented a whole new way of building complex
mechanisms the size of a peanut. It’s a process that
Photography by Ben Finio (A), Robert Wood (B), and J.P. Whitney (C)
58 Make: Volume 19
