A team of engineers at Harvard University has been inspired by Nature to create the first robotic fly. The mechanical fly has become a platform for a series of new high-tech systems. Designed to do what a fly does naturally, the tiny machine is the size of a fat housefly. Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.
哈佛大学的一个工程师团队受到《自然》的启发，创造了第一只机器人苍蝇。机械飞行已经成为一系列新型高科技系统的平台。这台微型机器的设计初衷是实现苍蝇的天然行为，大小相当于一只肥家蝇。它的微型机翼允许它停留在空中并执行受控飞行任务。
“It’s extremely important for us to think about this as a whole system and not just the sum of a bunch of individual components,” said Robert Wood, the Harvard engineering professor who has been working on the robotic fly project for over a decade. A few years ago, his team got the go-ahead to start piecing together the components. “The added difficulty with a project like this is that actually none of those components are off the shelf and so we have to develop them all on our own,” he said.
“对我们来说，将其视为一个整体而不仅仅是一系列单个元件的总和是极其重要的，” 哈佛大学工程学教授罗伯特·伍德说，他在机器人飞行项目上工作了十多年。几年前，他的团队获得了许可，开始拼接组件。他说：“像这样的项目的另一个困难是，实际上没有一个组件是现成的，所以我们必须自己开发它们”。
They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. “The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of interdependencies on the individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, but then has to be matched well to everything it’s connected to,” said Wood. The flight device was built into a set of power, computation, sensing and control systems. Wood says the success of the project proves that the flying robot with these tiny components can be built and manufactured.
他们设计了一系列系统来启动和驱动机器飞行。伍德说：“看似只是移动机翼这样简单的系统，但每个组件都有许多相互依赖，每个组件都必须表现良好，与它所连接的所有组件相匹配”。飞行装置内置于一套动力、计算、传感和控制系统中。伍德表示，该项目的成功证明，带有这些微小部件的飞行机器是可以制造的。
While this first robotic flyer is linked to a small, off-board power source, the goal is eventually to equip it with a built-in power source, so that it might someday perform data-gathering work at rescue sites, in farmers’ fields or on the battlefield. “Basically it should be able to take off, land and fly around,” he said.
虽然第一个机器飞行器与一个小型的非车载电源相连，但最终的目标是为其配备一个内置电源，以便它有朝一日能够在救援现场、农民田间或战场上执行数据收集工作。他说：“基本上，它应该能够起飞、降落和四处飞行”。
Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect-scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications. “You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animals, but using these robots instead,” he said. “So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day-to-day basis.”
伍德表示，该设计为研究昆虫大小的飞行机械和控制提供了一种新的途径。然而，机载电力、传感和计算技术可能有更广泛的应用。他说：“你可以开始考虑用它们来回答开放的科学问题，你知道，很难用动物来研究生物学，但可以用这些机器代替。因此，有很多技术和开放的有趣的科学问题确实是我们日常生活的动力。”
