They develop robots the size of an insect that emit light when they fly, like fireflies

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desarrollan robots del tamano de un insecto que emiten luz al volar como las luciernagas.jpg
desarrollan robots del tamano de un insecto que emiten luz al volar como las luciernagas.jpg

Within nature, fireflies are one of the insects that generate great admiration for their ability to generate light in your body.

Thanks to this property, known as bioluminescence, fireflies can make use of the light they emit to attract attention during mating courtship, as well as a defense mechanism to repel potential predators, making them believe that they are not suitable for eating or they are poisonous.

This peculiar characteristic of the firefly served as inspiration for a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technologyto develop robots the size of this insect and endow them with the ability to generate light while flying.

Another of the utilities that fireflies give to the light they generate is to communicate with each other, which seems to be the main purpose behind the work carried out by these researchers with these tiny robots and which seems to have been achieved.

Unlike large robots that have various tools to communicate, these robots are limited in that area. In this regard, the main author of the study, Kevin Chen, expressed the following in a statement:

This is a big step forward in making these robots fly in an outdoor environment where we don’t have state-of-the-art motion tracking systems.

In that sense, Kevin and his team had a new manufacturing technique used in the production of soft actuatorswhich perform a function similar to that of the muscles and that in the case of flying robots allows them to flap their wings.

For this, they used ultra-thin layers of elastomer With nanotube electrodes carbonwhich were alternated at the time of stacking, in order to make possible the creation of these artificial muscles.

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Following this, the researchers used zinc sulfate particleswhich have electroluminescent properties and applied them on these actuators.

Afterwards, each luminous actuator was taken into account as an active marker that can be followed with the iPhone cameras together with a computer program specially developed for this project.

Both tools made it possible for researchers to determine almost precisely the position and altitude of the robot. So the results were pretty close to achieving the same as the big motion capture systems.

Thanks to this feat, robots that now have the ability to emit light can use it to communicate and fly in environments outside the laboratory. In this way, its application becomes viable in search and rescue missions where they are sent to find survivors.