The smallest flying robot in the world has completed its maiden flight in a US laboratory. 
 
 The tiny machine, named RoboBee, took off, hovered and performed basic manoeuvres, to the delight of scientists at Harvard University. 
 
 Inspired by the common fly, the carbon fibre robot has a wingspan of three centimetres and weighs less than a tenth of a gram. 
 
 Flies are among the most agile flying creatures on Earth. The robot mimics their airborne abilities by tweaking the movement of two wafer-thin wings that flap at 120 times a second. 
 
 More advanced versions of the robot may help with search and rescue missions, monitor the environment, and even assist with crop pollination, its developers claim. 
 
 "I want to create something the world has never seen before," said Kevin Ma, a researcher on the team. 
 
 The robot's two wings are powered separately by tiny pieces of ceramic piezoelectric material, which expand and contract rapidly when wired to an alternating voltage. 
 
 For the maiden flight, researchers attached tiny reflective patches to the robot that could be picked up by eight infrared cameras mounted around the room. The cameras worked out where the robot was, and in which direction it was facing, and sent the information to a controlling computer that sent movement commands to the machine over a wire tether. To move left, for example, the robot increased the stroke of its right wing. 
 
 The robot was hooked up to an electrical supply because there are no batteries small or light enough to be carried by the machine. 
 
 The scientists described how they built the robot in the US journal, Science. "No such vehicle has been demonstrated to date because of the severe miniaturisation challenges that must be overcome for an insect-sized device," they wrote. 
 
 After the first tentative flight, the researchers aim to put the robot through its paces, with more aggressive manoeuvres and landings. ||||| The race to create the smallest drone has hit a new milestone thanks to the pioneering work of a group of researchers at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. After years of work the group has finally unveiled video footage of what it calls the RoboBee. 
 
 Named as such because of its insectoid size and appearance, the RoboBee has two membrane-like wings that flap at 120 times per second, allowing it to hover and fly at low speeds. Because of the robot's extremely small size, the developers had to use strips of ceramic called piezoelectric actuators that expand and contract when an electric field is applied to get the robot to fly. 
 
 Explaining the process, Kevin Y. Ma, one of the developers, said, "Large robots can run on electromagnetic motors, but at this small scale you have to come up with an alternative…" 
 
 Of course, the first thing some might assume the RoboBee will be used for is drone spying, but the research group is actually hoping it can offer aid in search-and-rescue operations, crop pollination, and environmental monitoring. You can see the RoboBee in all of its tiny glory in the video below. 
 
 Via Harvard 
 
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 at @dvice or find us on Facebook ||||| Look, up in the sky ... very, very closely. It's the first "robotic fly" unveiled by engineers, with wing designs based on real houseflies, and their manufacture inspired by origami. 
 
 Five individual robotic flies of identical design are shown alongside a U.S. penny for scale. (Photo: Kevin Ma, Pakpong Chirarattananon) Story Highlights Engineers have unveiled a housefly-sized "robot fly" that can hover and steer 
 
 The robot flies have laser-etched wings inspired by real insects and origami 
 
 Military and search-and-rescue drones may result from the advance 
 
 Robotics researchers unveiled an electronic housefly on Thursday, one that can hover in air, flapping its wings to steer in a first demonstration of controlled artificial-insect flight. 
 
 Each dime-sized "robot fly" weighs only 80 milligrams, about as much as a baby aspirin. In test flights, the tiny robots can fly for 20 seconds without crashing, tethered to lightweight copper wires that carry directions and power. 
 
 "It's hard, it has never been done before and it's just ridiculously cool," says Harvard's Kevin Ma, lead author on the Science journal study describing the robots. In a trick inspired by how real houseflies fly, the robots rely on two wings, each 15 millimeters wide, to steer and hover. A camera system hooked up to each robotic fly's control system essentially "trains itself," Ma says, to steer the imitation insects through a process of trial and error. 
 
 "Actually getting stable flight out of something this size is quite amazing," says mechanical engineer Christopher Rahn of Penn State, who was not on the study team. The aerodynamics of insect wings are much more complicated than air flow around the fixed wings of aircraft, for example. "The applications are endless, you could literally be a fly on the wall," Rahn says. 
 
 One particularly challenging aspect of re-creating insect flight is its notorious complexity. The wings both flap and rotate, unlike the simpler fixed wings on aircraft, making them much tougher for aerospace engineers to model and requiring controllers with 12-millionths of a second response times to keep them stable. "It's not a controller you would see anywhere else," Ma says. "Not in any toy store." 
 
 Although military surveillance in the drone era is one clear application of the robots and the work was partly funded by the Office of Naval Research, , "not all the applications are sinister ones," Rahn says. He points to demand for artificial pollinators for farmers. The National Science Foundation has supported the team's efforts to create "artificial bees." And they could be used for search-and-rescue operations to find people trapped in collapsed buildings. 
 
 The robot's designers led by Harvard's Robert Wood created an origami-inspired laser-cutting technology to make the robots, which are made of carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic. The robots rely on "piezoelectronic" motors, which vibrate in response to small electrical charges, to power the robotic fly's tiny wings. For a next step, Ma says, the team needs to find a battery light enough to power the robots so they can lose their wire tethers. 
 
 Just don't look for toy robotic flies in toy stores anytime soon, he adds. "You would need to do a lot of work to make them safe for kids." 
 
 
 
 
 
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– The Guardian calls it the "smallest flying robot in the world," DVice has it as the "world's smallest aerial drone," and USA Today settles for "electronic housefly." By whichever name, the dime-sized device by Harvard scientists is amazing. (They call it "RoboBee," for the record.) It has two tiny wings that flap 120 times per second and mimic the complicated flight of an actual insect. The scientists hope it can be applied to search-and-rescue missions or perhaps even crop pollination, among other things. "Actually getting stable flight out of something this size is quite amazing," says a mechanical engineer at Penn State, who wasn't involved with the work. He added something else sure to thrill those concerned about privacy: "The applications are endless—you could literally be a fly on the wall."