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Not to disparage anyone's work, these are all cool projects. Regarding your contenders:

The Festo eMotionButterflies fly, are wireless (battery powered), but have 50 cm wingspan (roughly twice that of the largest bio-butterfly). Insect-inspired, but a bit of a stretch to call it an "insect".

The Harvard hawkmoth is in the size range of bio-moths, but requires a launcher. That makes it more "falling with style" than "flying". It is also battery powered.

The Festo SmartBird) is a robotic bird, not insect.

RoboFly itself needs to do more than what is shown in the video for me to call it "flying". It could then clearly claim First Wirelessly-Powered Flying Robotic Insect. I think it will get there.

Not to disparage anyone's work, these are all cool projects. Regarding your contenders:

The Festo eMotionButterflies fly, are wireless (battery powered), but have 50 cm wingspan (roughly twice that of the largest bio-butterfly). Insect-inspired, but a bit of a stretch to call it an "insect".

The Harvard hawkmoth is in the size range of bio-moths, but requires a launcher. That makes it more "falling with style" than "flying". It is also battery powered.

The Festo SmartBird) is a robotic bird, not insect.

RoboFly itself needs to do more than what is shown in the video for me to call it "flying". It could then clearly claim First Wirelessly-Powered Flying Robotic Insect. I think it will get there.

German machine manufacturer Festo demonstrated an actually flying "Firefly" at the Hannover exhibition in 2013, see https://www.festo.com/group/de... for more information/videos. But of course, some "old economy" company building such is not quite as "hip" with the crowd hipsters as some garage boys are ;-)

That actually adds to the cool factor, for my money. Speaking of which I keep throwing money at the screen and I still don't have one of those butterflies, more tech details here.

Every year, Festo, the German robotics company, builds an exotic new kind of robot as a demo. Many of their robots have been "soft".

• The Festo Aqua Penguin which, like a penguin, "flies" in water.
• The Festo Air Jelly, a flying jellyfish. Lighter than air.
• The Festo Air Penguin, another lighter than air flyer, with flapping wings and good control.
• The Festo Bionic Handling Assistant, an air-driven flexible hand. Looks a lot like what these academics are trying to do, but it came out in 2010 and works fine.
• The Festo Smart Bird, which looks like a bird and flies like a bird, very well.

Here's their whole list of experimental projects. They've been doing "soft robots" since 2007. Others were doing "soft robots" before that, but the control usually wasn't that good. Festo builds soft robots with smooth, precise control. Festo's specialty is precise control of pneumatic systems, so they know how to do this.

Yep, robotics is progressing in leaps and bounds...

Behold the BionicKangaroo

http://www.festo.com/cms/en_co...

Just look at it!

Yes. the TED Video is a demonstration of the FESTO Smartbird, see also Youtube Video. This Video is a stupid mash-up. They seem to have found an small video drone, bird shaped, with fixed wings. Any of intelligence agency or a good RC plane builder can build those. But Smartbid is entirely different. As you can see in the above TED Video it has many organic build internal conjunction. The above shown picture and open body is much simpler. So maybe the found a RC Plane that looks like a bird. Maybe it was even used by a foreign power in an Arabic country. But that video does not give you any clues beside some shaky videos and pictures....

I think Bellisario should sue... They totally ripped off the Airwolf intro music.


On a side note I love how they took the festo smart bird video and dirtied it up to look military lol...

http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/11369_11439.htm#id_11439

That's a well-known early development in walking machines. Technically it's closer to being an exoskeleton than a robot. It's slaved to the limbs of the guy inside, and is dependent on his balance reflexes. That didn't work out too well.

It took a long time to get legged machines to work well. Most early work was about gait and foot coordination. It turns out that balance is more important than gait, and slip control is more important than balance. It finally all came together with BigDog. (BigDog demonstrates that the technology was finally far enough along that throwing $20 million at the problem was a win. Money alone is not enough; see the Flight Telerobotic Servicer, on which NASA blew over $200 million in the late 1980s. DARPA also funded a 6-legged walking truck in the 1980s, but it never got beyond a slow walk on easy terrain.)

The GE walker dates from an era when American industry tried to push the state of the art with ambitious internal research projects. That's rare in the US today. But in Germany, there's Festo. Every year, Festo does an impressive robotics project. They've done a flexible manta ray which swims through water; it's highly maneuverable and moves and looks like a real manta ray. Most recently, they built a robot bird, which flies around gracefully and under good control.

That's a well-known early development in walking machines. Technically it's closer to being an exoskeleton than a robot. It's slaved to the limbs of the guy inside, and is dependent on his balance reflexes. That didn't work out too well.

It took a long time to get legged machines to work well. Most early work was about gait and foot coordination. It turns out that balance is more important than gait, and slip control is more important than balance. It finally all came together with BigDog. (BigDog demonstrates that the technology was finally far enough along that throwing $20 million at the problem was a win. Money alone is not enough; see the Flight Telerobotic Servicer, on which NASA blew over $200 million in the late 1980s. DARPA also funded a 6-legged walking truck in the 1980s, but it never got beyond a slow walk on easy terrain.)

The GE walker dates from an era when American industry tried to push the state of the art with ambitious internal research projects. That's rare in the US today. But in Germany, there's Festo. Every year, Festo does an impressive robotics project. They've done a flexible manta ray which swims through water; it's highly maneuverable and moves and looks like a real manta ray. Most recently, they built a robot bird, which flies around gracefully and under good control.

then you might find these interesting:

http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/9772_10378.htm#id_10378
http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/9786_10401.htm#id_10401

then you might find these interesting:

http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/9772_10378.htm#id_10378
http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/9786_10401.htm#id_10401

here you go, movie:

http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/11082_11090.htm

It's surprisingly hard to automate page-turning. I saw the first page-turning machine many years ago, at the Census Bureau. It was used for 1970 Census form booklets, and used a vacuum belt to hold the booklet down while a wheel with vacuum holes rolled over the page to turn the page. This only worked for booklets with known dimensions, and it was rather rough on the booklets. But it was fast, doing about two flips a second.

It's such a boring job for humans that they screw up. A hand appears in the picture, or they turn two pages. So you need automation, or at least automated error checking.

The problem with mechanism design is making it both fast and gentle. There are lots of things that will work at one page every five seconds. Getting to two pages a second and never tearing one is tough. Most of the existing designs are simplistic; they're just some dumb mechanism making a repetitive motion with an air picker. The book-scanning developers haven't progressed to closed-loop force control yet.

Festo, the German robotics and actuator company, could probably build a better page turner. They build a wide range of machines which handle delicate objects fast in production environments. Their Bionic Tripod with Fin-Gripper is an example.

It's surprisingly hard to automate page-turning. I saw the first page-turning machine many years ago, at the Census Bureau. It was used for 1970 Census form booklets, and used a vacuum belt to hold the booklet down while a wheel with vacuum holes rolled over the page to turn the page. This only worked for booklets with known dimensions, and it was rather rough on the booklets. But it was fast, doing about two flips a second.

It's such a boring job for humans that they screw up. A hand appears in the picture, or they turn two pages. So you need automation, or at least automated error checking.

The problem with mechanism design is making it both fast and gentle. There are lots of things that will work at one page every five seconds. Getting to two pages a second and never tearing one is tough. Most of the existing designs are simplistic; they're just some dumb mechanism making a repetitive motion with an air picker. The book-scanning developers haven't progressed to closed-loop force control yet.

Festo, the German robotics and actuator company, could probably build a better page turner. They build a wide range of machines which handle delicate objects fast in production environments. Their Bionic Tripod with Fin-Gripper is an example.

There's a cute usage of them here, for parachute drop cushioning.