MAVs, short for Micro Aerial Vehicles, like these ones in the video from MIT’s Robust Robotic Group, a research wing of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, are a marvel in the robotics research which can fly without GPS through unmapped indoor environments, and Dude, this is no comic book super fantasy or Hollywood Sci-fi but exists in cemented reality !

These robots can be used for military as well as civil aerial reconnaissance, search and rescue operations, civil engineering inspections, and a multitude of tasks where in sending a human is difficult and dangerous. These MAVs have a high level of autonomous behavior in difficult terrains armed with an array of sensors working on a gamut of artificial intelligence algorithms.

With a little bit of googling one can easily find an array of these technologies that exist in paper and reality. Several types including the ones called Ornithopters (that has flapping wings) are bio-inspired and modelled by engineers by carefully involving the huge range of science and technology trends in decision-theoretic planning, statistical inference, and artificial intelligence.

The above is a research headed in the Robust Robotics Group which specializes in areas of Micro-Air Vehicle Navigation and Control and Human-Robot Interaction for Assistive Robots.

Guess what, TU Delft had earlier designed a micro sized 3 gram Ornithopter christened ‘DelFly‘ last year. The silver lining here is, it is the world’s smallest Ornithopter equipped with a camera !! Well I just remember my high school Principal’s golden words - Tomorrow the world will be dealing with - more and more about less and less ! How true it is !

An interesting note: The Washington Post has referred to insect-like versions of MAVs as Robobugs ;)

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