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A robot as small as a housefly has managed the delicate task of flying and hovering the way the actual insects do.

“This is a major engineering breakthrough, 15 years in the making,” says electrical engineer Ronald Fearing, who works on robotic flies at the University of California, Berkeley. The device uses layers of ultrathin materials that can make its wings flap 120 times a second, which is on a par with a housefly’s flapping rate. This “required tremendous innovation in design and fabrication techniques”, he adds.

The robot’s wings are composed of thin polyester films reinforced with carbon fibre ribs and its ‘muscles’ are made from piezoelectric crystals, which shrink or stretch depending on the voltage applied to them.

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