![]() ![]() ![]() “You’d want a drone to move around with a small camera to check for cracks on the turbine plates.”īut the robots aren’t able to do much yet. “Think about the inspection of a turbine engine,” he said. But they could be used for more practical purposes too, like pollinating crops, searching across areas hit by disasters, and inspecting machinery. He said that the 0.6 gram drones - about the weight of a bumblebee - could provide insights into the physics of insect flight. “It can also do aggressive maneuvers like somersaults in the air.” “You can hit it when it’s flying, and it can recover,” said assistant professor Kevin Yufeng Chen in a release. And like an actual insect, it can handle a mild swatting. That’s 50 times faster than a typical hummingbird and over twice as fast as a bee. The cylinder rapidly contracts and expands when voltage is applied to the nanotubes, which flaps the drone’s wings nearly 500 times per second. ![]() Instead of a hard and inflexible actuator like a typical electric motor, the ones in the drones are made of thin and flexible rubber cylinders coated in carbon nanotubes. ![]()
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