INSPIRED by the biology of a bee and the insect’s hive behavior …
Harvard University researchers recently got a $10 million grant to create a colony of flying robotic bees. The above was granted yet commercial beekeepers which lost money from CCD during the crash of 2006/2007 did not get one thin dime!
….we aim to push advances in miniature robotics and the design of compact high-energy power sources; spur innovations in ultra-low-power computing and electronic “smart” sensors; and refine coordination algorithms to manage multiple, independent machines. BTW, our robobees don’t sting…
A multidisciplinary team of computer scientists, engineers, and biologists at Harvard received a $10 million National Science Foundation (NSF) Expeditions in Computing grant for RoboBees, a colony of small-scale mobile robotic devices.
Vision and Aims
The collaborators envision that the Nature-inspired research could lead to a greater understanding of how to artificially mimic the collective behavior and “intelligence” of a bee colony; foster novel methods for designing and building an electronic surrogate nervous system able to deftly sense and adapt to changing environments; and advance work on the construction of small-scale flying mechanical devices.
More broadly, the scientists anticipate the devices will open up a wide range of discoveries and practical innovations, advancing fields ranging from entomology and developmental biology to amorphous computing and electrical engineering.
Through a relationship with the Museum of Science, Boston, the team will also create an interactive exhibit to teach and inspire future scientists and engineers.
Body, Brain, and Colony
From flies to fish to lobsters, small insects and animals have long been ideal models for roboticists and computer scientists. Bees, for example, possess unmatched elegance in flight, zipping from flower to flower with ease and hovering stably with heavy payloads.
Body
By leveraging existing breakthroughs from Professor Wood’s Microrobotics Lab, which conducted the first successful flight of a life-sized robotic fly in 2007, the team will explore ways to emulate such aerobatic feats in their proposed devices. In addition, achieving autonomous flight will require compact high-energy power sources and associated electronics, integrated seamlessly into the ‘body’ of the machine.
Brain
One of the most complicated areas of exploration the scientists will undertake will be the creation of a suite of artificial “smart” sensors, akin to a bee’s eyes and antennae. Professor Wei explains that the ultimate aim is to design dynamic hardware and software that serves as the device’s ‘brain,’ controlling and monitoring flight, sensing objects such as fellow devices and other objects, and coordinating simple decision-making.
Colony
Should the $10 Million have gone to bee keepers?
- Yes! (50%, 1 Votes)
- No! (50%, 1 Votes)
- Who? (0%, 0 Votes)
- I hate honey! (0%, 0 Votes)
- Real bees are so '90s (0%, 0 Votes)
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Loading ...Finally, to mimic the sophisticated behavior of a real colony of insects will involve the development of sophisticated coordination algorithms, communications methods (i.e., the ability for individual machines to ‘talk’ to one another and the hive), and global-to-local programming tools to simulate the ways groups of real bees rely upon one another to scout, forage, and plan.
The Team
The investigators, primarily based at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, will coordinate efforts with faculty from the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and Northeastern University’s Department of Biology.
In addition, Centeye, a microelectronics firm in Washington, D.C., specializing in vision chip and visual sensor technology, will contribute technical knowledge.
A number of the collaborators are core faculty members of the newly created Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. As the work fits particularly well with Wyss’s mission of “creating new materials and devices using Nature’s design principles,” the Institute, along with SEAS, will play a critical role in supporting the research, providing laboratory space and in-kind financial support.
Funding
Harvard is one of three lead institutions receiving the latest round of awards under the NSF’s Expeditions in Computing program.
The program, established last year by the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), provides the CISE research and education community with the opportunity to pursue ambitious, fundamental research agendas that promise to define the future of computing and information and render great benefit to society. Funded at levels up to $2,000,000 per year for five years, Expeditions represent some of the largest single investments currently made by the directorate.
Research
Overview of Research
The overarching aspiration of this project is to combine multiple diverse research topics under the goal of robotic pollinators. By bringing together experts from biology, computer science, and mechanical and electrical engineering, our end product will be much more than the sum of the parts.
While a project of this scale relies on numerous interactions and requires tight collaboration between the investigators, the proposed research neatly falls into three aforementioned categories: body, brain, and colony.
- The body involves all aspects of the proposed work that revolve around construction of a flapping-wing robot. We will explore several aspects of free flight mechanics and performance to guide our design of an autonomous robotic bee.
- The brain incorporates all of the sensors, control (i.e. algorithms and software), and circuitry (i.e., hardware) to coordinate flight and target identification capabilities of the RoboBees.
- The colony encompasses higher-level support required to accomplish objectives of a complex task in a collaborative manner. We seek to leverage the colony as a whole for parallel, energy-efficient, and robust operation.
This project emphasizes collaboration between researchers across a wide range of scientific and engineering disciplines to realize its ambitious goals. It also offers an exciting platform from which to share scientific and technological breakthroughs with the public in a tangible, easily-accessible manner.
Man that $10 million could have come in handy for the real beekeepers across our nation
Republished from Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science
