Robobees Might Solve the World's Honey Bee Problem
As Awe've noted before, honey bees have been dying by the thousands, and it's a big problem for the United States and its food supply. We depend on bees to pollinate our food supplies, and when they don't, crops suffer. When crops don't yield much product, the price of that product goes sky high. It's a cycle that won't be fun for anyone, should it begin. Thanks to the Robobee, that disaster of a future might be permanently on pause. RoboBee isn't as cool as Robocop, but trust us, the former is much more important than the latter.
The Robobee project has actually been underway since 2009. A team of Harvard University researchers began busily working on tiny, robotic bees that could hopefully one day replace bees, should they die off. The robotic bees are half the size of a paperclip and weigh less than a tenth of a gram. Their wings are so thin you can barely make them out. The Robobee, essentially, is meant to mimic the honey bee in every way.
That's the goal, at least. It wasn't easy to create the first one, let alone a colony. The main issue? Size. Bees are tiny, and that means tiny parts for the Robobee. The size obstacle was so difficult to overcome that it took the Harvard team coming up with a new system to build the bees to get things underway. "Sheets of various laser-cut materials are layered and sandwiched together into a thin, flat plate that folds up like a child's pop-up book into the complete electromechanical structure," explained a post on Harvard University's website. "The quick, step-by-step process replaces what used to be a painstaking manual art and allows Wood's team to use more robust materials in new combinations, while improving the overall precision of each device. The device, according to Kevin Ma, a co-creator of the Robobee project, allowed them "to be more aggressive in how we test them."
Once testing was underway, the team saw the possibilities. "You could replace a hive of honeybees that would otherwise be working on a field of flowers," said Ma, in an interview with Business Insider. "They would be able to perform the same task of going from flower to flower picking up and putting down pollen. They wouldn't have to collect nectar like real bees. They would just be transmitting pollen. But to do this the robots first need to fly on their own and fly very well. In theory, they would just have to come back to something to recharge their batteries. But we're very early on in working this out."
Although Robobees won't be fully functional for another 10 years, the fact that progress has been made is great news for everyone. This is the one robot takeover that doesn't sound so bad.
[Image via Flickr - Aussie Gal]
