Robotic fireflies could help in rescue missions

Following nature’s lead, MIT scientists have built soft electroluminescent artificial muscles to robots insect-scale flyers.

The tiny artificial muscles that control the robots’ wings emit colored lights during flight. in the style of fireflies.

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This electroluminescence could allow robots to communicate with each other. If sent on a search and rescue mission to a collapsed building, for example, a robot finding survivors could use lights to signal others for help.

The ability to emit light also leads to these microscale robots, which they weigh little more than a paperclip, one step closer to flying alone out of the lab. These robots are so light they can’t carry sensors, so researchers must track them using bulky infrared cameras that don’t work well outdoors. Now they have shown that they can track the robots precisely using the light they emit and just three smartphone cameras.

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“If you think about robots on a large scale, they can communicate using a lot of different tools: Bluetooth, wireless, all that sort of thing. But for a tiny, power-constrained robot, we are forced to think of new modes of communication. This is an important step in getting these robots to fly in outdoor environments where we don’t have a well-tuned state-of-the-art motion tracking system,” Kevin Chen, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, says in a statement. (EECS) of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and lead author of the article.

He and his collaborators they achieved this by embedding tiny electroluminescent particles into artificial muscles. The process adds just 2.5 percent more weight without affecting the robot’s flight performance.

Source: Elcomercio

James

I have worked as a journalist for over 10 years and have written for various news outlets. I currently work as an author at 24 News Recorder, mostly covering entertainment news. I have a keen interest in the industry and enjoy writing about the latest news and gossip. I am also a member of the National Association of Journalists.