“You can hit it when it’s flying, and it can recover,” says Chen. Repeated elongation and contraction causes the drone’s wings to beat - fast.Ĭhen’s actuators can flap nearly 500 times per second, giving the drone insect-like resilience. When voltage is applied to the carbon nanotubes, they produce an electrostatic force that squeezes and elongates the rubber cylinder. The soft actuators are made of thin rubber cylinders coated in carbon nanotubes. And that’s a problem when you’re building a robot to mimic an insect - foraging bumblebees endure a collision about once every second.Ĭhen designed a more resilient tiny drone using soft actuators instead of hard, fragile ones. While piezoelectric ceramics allowed the first generation of tiny robots to take flight, they’re quite fragile. The principal alternative until now has been employing a small, rigid actuator built from piezoelectric ceramic materials. So, Chen says, for insect-like robots “you need to look for alternatives.” Large drones are usually powered by motors, but motors lose efficiency as you shrink them. The question is: Can you create insect-scale robots that can move around in very complex, cluttered spaces?”Īccording to Chen, “The challenge of building small aerial robots is immense.” Pint-sized drones require a fundamentally different construction from larger ones. “Most of their applications involve flying outdoors. “If we look at most drones today, they’re usually quite big,” says Chen. Typically, drones require wide open spaces because they’re neither nimble enough to navigate confined spaces nor robust enough to withstand collisions in a crowd. His co-authors include MIT PhD student Zhijian Ren, Harvard University PhD student Siyi Xu, and City University of Hong Kong roboticist Pakpong Chirarattananon. Chen hopes the robots could one day aid humans by pollinating crops or performing machinery inspections in cramped spaces.Ĭhen’s work appears this month in the journal IEEE Transactions on Robotics. The aerial robots are powered by a new class of soft actuator, which allows them to withstand the physical travails of real-world flight. Such traits are also hard to build into flying robots, but MIT Assistant Professor Kevin Yufeng Chen has built a system that approaches insects’ agility.Ĭhen, a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Research Laboratory of Electronics, has developed insect-sized drones with unprecedented dexterity and resilience. Those traits help them navigate the aerial world, with all of its wind gusts, obstacles, and general uncertainty.
Hives have queen bees, worker bees, and drone bees.Beekeepers use this to keep bees calm when collecting honey or moving a hive. The buzz you hear around a bee is the sound of their wings beating thousands of times per minute.Honey bees make honey by following a lengthy 10-step process!.Some bees of course also eat honey! Honey bees make honey and use it to feed their young and so they have something to eat during the winter, when they can’t get pollen from flowers as easily.
This creates symbiosis and allows plants to keep growing, which keeps our air breathable.
Bees can drop pollen while they’re flying, which helps pollinate other flowers and plants.They carry pollen on their legs and body from flower to flower.
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