RoboFly

Quite a number of people wrote to us yesterday about The San Francisco Chronicle running an article about robotic flies with cameras. Pretty cool looking thing - capable of flight, with four wings - although the whole steering thing still needs be resolved, apparently.

Comments

a couple of observations

[rde]

Its creators are not mad scientists but Ph.D.s.
This reporter obviously doesn't know much about mad scientists.

The Navy loved robofly. It also loved robolobster, now being built at Northeastern University, and robopike, which swims in a tank at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
They were also very impressed by Robocop, a 1990 film that may well be one of the best movies of all time.

And this bit I didn't understand at all. Can someone elucidate?
But why a fly? Why not something with a little more pizzazz like, say, a dragonfly?
Two reasons, said Ron Fearing, the top gun behind the micromechanical flying insect. First, dragonflies have four wings.

``That automatically doubles the complexity of the project,'' Fearing said.

So instead they built a fly with four wings.