About five years ago, a bizarre idea occurred to me. At the time, I was designing complex electronic circuits to mimic a small portion of an insect brain. These circuits would be created on a tiny ...

Science frequently draws inspiration from the natural world. After all, nature has had billions of years to perfect its systems and processes. Taking their cue from mollusk catch muscles, researchers ...

In an age of increasingly advanced robotics, one team has well and truly bucked the trend, instead finding inspiration within the pinhead-sized brain of a tiny flying insect in order to build a robot ...

A drone buzzes through a greenhouse, weaving between rows of tomatoes. Another inspects a warehouse ceiling for damage. A ...

(Nanowerk Spotlight) Building robots that can effortlessly mimic the movements of insects on water has been a persistent challenge in robotics. The ability to move autonomously and efficiently in ...

DENVER (KDVR) — A University of Colorado Boulder researcher received a grant to build something straight out of a spy movie. The United States Air Force Research Laboratory awarded CU assistant ...

Engineers have studied how insects navigate, for the purpose of developing energy-efficient robots. With a brain the size of a pinhead, insects perform fantastic navigational feats. They avoid ...

Kaushik Jayaram envisions a day when swarms of tiny robots, some weighing no more than a paperclip, will crawl through airplanes or into buildings after an earthquake—searching for survivors or ...

An organic synapse array enables night vision and pattern recognition in insect robots by detecting near-infrared light and triggering real-time motor responses. (Nanowerk Spotlight) Insect-scale ...

Police release a swarm of robot moths to sniff out a distant drug stash and robot bees dodge through earthquake rubble to find survivors. These may sound like science-fiction scenarios but they are ...