Early one morning last year, at the robotics laboratory of Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) in the US, an insect took flight. Half the size of a paperclip, weighing less than a tenth of a gram, it leapt a few inches, hovered for a moment on fragile, flapping wings, and then sped along a preset route through the air. Like a proud parent watching a child take its first steps, graduate student Pakpong Chirarattananon immediately captured a video of the fledgling and emailed it to his adviser and colleagues at 3am, with the subject line "Flight of the RoboBee".
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