They creep. They crawl. They fly. Now insects are inspiring innovation, from robots to display screens.
An ant faced with two paths to a food source may not know which is best, but an ant colony can quickly sort this out: Individuals leave trails of chemicals called pheromones to mark the route from nest to food and back. As other ants follow, pheromones build up more rapidly along the shortest route, reinforcing the scent and guiding the colony en masse.
A honeybee colony similarly pools its resources to select a home. Several hundred “scouts” head out to search, reporting back on potential sites. Other scouts follow up, choosing sides until a quorum has settled on a particular spot. This life-or-death decision draws on the collective wisdom — or swarm intelligence — of the hive.
Inspired by examples like this, engineers are producing ensembles of small, insect-like robots that cooperatively perform jobs that might be difficult, dangerous or tedious for humans to carry out. As in nature, these robotic systems tend to be decentralized, composed of agents doing simple things that add up to communal achievements. Although the current price tags per unit are generally in the triple digits, developers hope one day to make the devices so inexpensive that some robots could be lost or damaged without jeopardizing the entire mission.
“In the end we always go back to nature to see what insects do,” says University of Washington engineer and robo-centipede designer Karl Böhringer. “They can do amazing things, and we want to be able to do them too.”
RoboBees to the Rescue
In 2007, Robert Wood, the founder of Harvard’s Microrobotics Lab, became the first person to get a fly-size, flapping-wing robot to take off; a minuscule motor powered its plastic wings. The whole thing
— including a carbon-fiber body not much bigger than a fingernail — weighed just two-thousandths of an ounce. A colleague urged Wood to build a fleet of these vehicles, giving rise to the RoboBees project: a five-year, multidisciplinary venture involving biologists, computer scientists and engineers.
The current RoboBee is considerably bigger, weighing nearly two-hundredths of an ounce. Its image-processing system tries to emulate the way real bees process images, with low-resolution camera “eyes” taking continual snapshots and forwarding information to the RoboBee’s “brain.”
One virtue is the minuscule weight of a single RoboBee. A firefighter, Wood suggests, could carry 1,000 of them in a pocket, weighing just a pound in all, and let them fly in or around burning buildings, dispatching information to rescue workers. Someday, RoboBees might track fast-changing events such as forest fires, oil spills or chemical plumes. Or they could pollinate flowers or crops — a pressing concern now that real bees are dying off from disease, chemical toxins and other causes.
The robot’s biggest drawback, at the moment, is that it has to be wired to an external power source. Although achieving untethered, autonomous flight is a top priority, Wood doesn’t want to “wait until the perfect power source is available” before perfecting other elements of design. Some team members are trying to develop a lightweight power option, while others are working on sensors and manufacturing methods. “All these things are going on at once,” he notes.
The engineers are also designing algorithms to regulate the behavior of thousands of RoboBees engaged in tasks like pollination. “We take our inspiration from nature,” says Harvard postdoc Karthik Dantu, “but then we decide what’s practical from an engineering standpoint.”
In 2007, Robert Wood, the founder of Harvard’s Microrobotics Lab, became the first person to get a fly-size, flapping-wing robot to take off; a minuscule motor powered its plastic wings. The whole thing — including a carbon-fiber body not much bigger than a fingernail — weighed just two-thousandths of an ounce. A colleague urged Wood to build a fleet of these vehicles, giving rise to the RoboBees project: a five-year, multidisciplinary venture involving biologists, computer scientists and engineers.
The current RoboBee is considerably bigger, weighing nearly two-hundredths of an ounce. Its image-processing system tries to emulate the way real bees process images, with low-resolution camera “eyes” taking continual snapshots and forwarding information to the RoboBee’s “brain.”
One virtue is the minuscule weight of a single RoboBee. A firefighter, Wood suggests, could carry 1,000 of them in a pocket, weighing just a pound in all, and let them fly in or around burning buildings, dispatching information to rescue workers. Someday, RoboBees might track fast-changing events such as forest fires, oil spills or chemical plumes. Or they could pollinate flowers or crops — a pressing concern now that real bees are dying off from disease, chemical toxins and other causes.
The robot’s biggest drawback, at the moment, is that it has to be wired to an external power source. Although achieving untethered, autonomous flight is a top priority, Wood doesn’t want to “wait until the perfect power source is available” before perfecting other elements of design. Some team members are trying to develop a lightweight power option, while others are working on sensors and manufacturing methods. “All these things are going on at once,” he notes.
The engineers are also designing algorithms to regulate the behavior of thousands of RoboBees engaged in tasks like pollination. “We take our inspiration from nature,” says Harvard postdoc Karthik Dantu, “but then we decide what’s practical from an engineering standpoint.”
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