Developer - Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory
RoboBee on Wikipedia
Leader - Robert Wood
Playlist "Robobees"
Developer - Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory
RoboBee on Wikipedia
Leader - Robert Wood
Playlist "Robobees"
RoboBees: Design Poses Intriguing Engineering, Computer Science Challenges - Science Nation
Published on Oct 25, 2012
Article "Robotic Insects Make First Controlled Flight"It started with a TV show, "Silence of the Bees," about honeybee populations in steep decline. At Harvard University, electrical engineers Rob Wood and Gu-Yeon Wei, and computer scientist Radhika Nagpal saw a challenge. And, so began the creation of the "RoboBee," a miniature flying robot, inspired by the biology of a bee and the insect's hive behavior. With support from the National Science Foundation and a program called Expeditions in Computing, Wood put together a diverse team of collaborators to get the RoboBee project off the ground. One challenge is to design a small exoskeleton to house the bee's wings, motors, brain and electronics. Power is another issue. If the fuel source is too heavy, the bee can't fly. For mass production, Wood's team developed a folding assembly, inspired, in a lot of ways, by a children's pop-up book. Ultimately, the researchers hope to build a colony in which the RoboBees interact, using their hive as a refueling station. They say RoboBees have the potential to be useful in a number of ways, including search and rescue missions, traffic monitoring, and weather mapping.
by Harvard University
May 2, 2013
Robotic Insect: World's Smallest Flying Robot Takes Off 2013 HD
Published on May 2, 2013
Scientists in the US have created a robot the size of a fly that is able to perform the agile manoeuvres of the ubiquitous insects.
This "robo-fly", built from carbon fibre, weighs a fraction of a gram and has super-fast electronic "muscles" to power its wings.
Its Harvard University developers say tiny robots like theirs may eventually be used in rescue operations.
It could, for example, navigate through tiny spaces in collapsed buildings.
Dr Kevin Ma from Harvard University and his team, led by Dr Robert Wood, say they have made the world's smallest flying robot.
It also has the fly-like agility that allows the insects to evade even the swiftest of human efforts to swat them.
This comes largely from very precise wing movements.
By constantly adjusting the effect of lift and thrust acting on its body at an incredibly high speed, the insect's (and the robot's) wings enable it to hover, or to perform sudden evasive manoeuvres.
And just like a real fly, the robot's thin, flexible wings beat approximately 120 times every second.
The researchers achieved this wing speed with special substance called piezoelectric material, which contracts every time a voltage is applied to it.
By very rapidly switching the voltage on and off, the scientists were able to make this material behave like just like the tiny muscles that makes a fly's wings beat so fast.
Dr Ma even suggested that the robots could behave like many real insects and assist with the pollination of crops, "to function as the now-struggling honeybee populations do in supporting agriculture around the world".
The current model of robo-fly is tethered to a small, off-board power source but Dr Ma says the next step will be to miniaturise the other bits of technology that will be needed to create a "fully wireless flying robot".
Tiny Insect-Like Flying Robots
Published on May 3, 2013
The demonstration of the first controlled flight of an insect-sized robot is the culmination of more than a decade's work, led by researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.
Controlling a robotic insect using ocelli
Published on Jun 24, 2014
The Harvard Microrobotics Lab has demonstrated upright stability in a flapping-wing robotic insect using an onboard vision sensor inspired by insect ocelli. This work was funded by the NSF and the Wyss Institute.
National Geographic Live! - Robert Wood: Robotic Insects
Published on Aug 4, 2014
Electrical engineer Robert Wood leads a team that invents and develops entirely new classes of mircrorobots poised to play a transformative role in medicine, search-and-rescue missions, and agriculture.
Harvard RoboBee diving, hovering, swimming
Uploaded on Sep 30, 2015
“Hybrid Aerial and Aquatic Locomotion in an At-Scale Robotic Insect,” by Yufeng Chen, E. Farrell Helbling, Nick Gravish, Kevin Ma, and Robert J. Wood from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University was presented at IROS 2015 in Hamburg, Germany.
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