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Honey bees are disappearing mysteriously. Many do not return after they leave their hives. Without honey bees, we will not get honey and, more serious, since fruit trees and flowering plants are not pollinated, we do not have fruits and vegetable crops. What if we could make flapping robots, of the size of honey bee and at a cost affordable for farmers, which can fly and pollinate flowers? Noninvasive surgery allows doctors to get into our body without cutting us. What if we could make flapping (or swimming) robots, small enough to get into our veins, which can swim through the vein system to reach our heart, where they can perform inspection and surgery? These are the reasons why we are eager to make flapping robots and make them as small as possible. There are many more useful and potentially dangerous applications of the flapping robots.
How are we going to achieve our goal? Leonardo da Vinci designed an ornithopter named after him. There exist flapping robots designed primarily after da Vinci Model. Should we copy them or borrow their ideas for our design? Although the progress of science and, especially, technology cannot be considered without such copying activities, we can do much better than that by learning from nature. Nature is our great teacher, but it opens its secrets only to those who love and respect nature and have patients and means to observe the signals sent by the nature. We intend to learn the secret of flying by observing the nature, specifically, flying insects. It is essential to come to love insects and respect them. Also important is to be prepared to spend a lot of time with insects while investing your time to acquire skills and means to extract useful scientific information through the observation of the insects and their flights and apply it to the design of flapping robots.
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