Did you envision a giant machine assembling cars, Data from "Star Trek," C-3PO from "Star Wars" or "The Terminator"? Most of us would probably think of something massive -- or at least human size. But ...

Tiny drones could one day crawl through collapsed buildings to help find survivors after earthquakes. These micro-robots, inspired by insects, now show flight skills close to the real thing.

One of the most commonly suggested uses for tiny robots is the search for trapped survivors in disaster site rubble. The insect-inspired CLARI robot could be particularly good at doing so, as it can ...

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 ...

Robots helped achieve a major breakthrough in our understanding of how insect flight evolved. The study is a result of a six-year long collaboration between roboticists and biophysicists. Robots built ...

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 ...

Insect-scale robots can squeeze into places their larger counterparts can't, like deep into a collapsed building to search for survivors after an earthquake. However, as they move through the rubble, ...

Insects in nature not only possess amazing flying skills but also can attach to and climb on walls of various materials. Insects that can perform flapping-wing flight, climb on a wall, and switch ...

It’s not very common that a robot the size of a paper clip is able to do ten flips in eleven seconds and keep on course within five centimeters, says Markus Waibel of Waibel Robotics in Zurich. But ...

An error has occurred. Please try again. With a The Portland Press Herald subscription, you can gift 5 articles each month. It looks like you do not have any active ...

Researchers led by Nick Gravish, a faculty member in the UC San Diego Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, built a small flapper robot that operates in air. Robots built by engineers at ...

Cyborg cockroaches that find earthquake survivors. A "robofly" that sniffs out gas leaks. Flying lightning bugs that pollinate farms in space. These aren't just buzzy ideas, they're becoming reality.