Tiny, Robotic Bees Could Change the World | National Geographic

so I want to begin with a bold
statements that robotics is the next
Internet it’s the next big thing to
impact our lives in areas from medicine
to even things like space exploration
the more traditional view of robotics is
a rigid very powerful very dangerous but
in this case we’re making things smaller
perhaps faster or certainly cheaper than
more traditional robotic systems we are
constructing robots the size of insects
robots made out of entirely soft
materials
we use nature to inspire the robots that
we build
nature’s had hundreds of millions of
years to evolve solutions to things like
locomotion in cluttered areas or flights
our team is working on creating a colony
of autonomous robotic bees we envision
that’s twenty or so years down the road
when these things actually exist they
could be quite useful for applications
where you would want to put a human or
an animal hazardous environment
exploration in search and rescue space
exploration assisted agriculture there’s
all these really interesting open
questions that must be solved if you’re
going to achieve this goal I have to
develop new sensors new computation
methods because nothing off the shelf is
going to work we have to build
everything from scratch
how many Robo bees if we crashed all of
them we build we test we build we test
if you don’t fail you don’t learn enough
we build we test we build we test for
everything that works is tens or
hundreds of things that don’t
the metaphor of bees is just as social
insects they’re small they’re not very
capable they can’t fly for very long so
what do you do and the answer in nature
is well you work together now you have
this concept where you have not just one
all capable robot but you have a bunch
of not very good robots the idea is that
the whole is greater than the sum of the
parts all of this work is aimed at the
greater good investing in the unknown
it’s by far the best routes to make
fundamental scientific advancements