Gauge Newsletter January 2019 | Page 54

couple of years, we can on the water surfaces such as imagine a future where these water striders and to control tiny robots can change our the mosquito breeding. lives. With all these developments Although today is an era of we come to a question that drones, these robot insects where the limitation of this are much ahead of drones development is. Simply since they are less noticeable, these robot insects can be less noisy and more versatile. developed in a range from Drones cannot access small rescuing a man in a wrecked places and they cannot reach building to killing a man a destination without being by one voice command in detected by people. But the future. Since there is no Robot insects have overcome limitation for the technology, these obstacles and these it is totally the responsibility tiny insects can reach even a of the engineers to use the building which is wrecked due powerful technology only for to an earthquake. Therefore, the betterment of mankind engineers believe that these without destroying the robots will fulfill a great balance of nature. task in search and rescue missions. Since these robots are less noticeable compared to a drone, they will be the future spying machines in military operations. When we consider the real insects, most of them directly contribute to the pollination. Therefore, these robot insects can also be used to take support for agricultural purposes. By implementing different kinds of sensors on the robot insect, they can be used for various tasks such as implementing chemical sensors to discover methane leaks. Furthermore, Engineers predict that they can be used for environmental monitoring, space exploration and forming communication networks too. Also, now the engineers try to develop these robot insects to travel PAGE| 52 University of Peradeniya GAUGE Magazine References: (1). Micromechanical Flying Insect, Biomimetic Millisystems Lab Available at: https://people. eecs.berkeley.edu/~ronf/MFI/ index.html (Accessed on June 16) (2). The first wireless flying ro- botic insect takes off Available at: https://www.washington. edu/news/2018/05/15/robofly/ (Accessed on June 26) (3). Micromechanical Flying Insect Available at: https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro- mechanical_Flying_Insect (Ac- cessed on June 16) D.Sajini Ishanthi, 2nd Year- Department of Computer Engineering Faculty of engineering, University of Peradeniya.