The National Science Foundation has a CAREER award that rewards particularly promising young scientists with a 5 year (rather than the standard three year) research grant. The University of Delaware’s  Xinyan Deng has won one to study robotic flies.

…one of the goals of the research is to study the flight attributes observed in insects and to investigate the underlying principles that result in flight stability and also lead to differences in performance in order to develop a methodology and guidelines for designing flapping-wing microaerial vehicles.

Beside mathematical modeling and theoretical studies, Deng hopes to design and fabricate workable flapping-wing microaerial vehicles, or miniature flying robots, that are capable of stable and maneuverable flight with biomimetic sensors.

UD Press Release