Robobee
You may remember about one year ago, I posted a video of robotic flying multicopters building a structure. I was so intrigued that I have built my own robotic quadcopter based on the Arducopter design with the intent of engineering a true autonomous swarm. But more on that at a future date. Here is RoboBees (click here) – a research project at Harvard seeking to develop mechanical structures that fly – inspired by bees and enabled by microelectronic fabrication technology. The mechanical device shown is the size of a penny but the MEMS technology could be used to build something much smaller. The video below shows the result of the manufacturing process but they also have videos of this thing flying and are working on an optical sensor and swarm behaviors.
Video after the jump…
Mind you, this is still very preliminary work but it is still impressive and the idea of swarms of these things in 10 years does not seem as far fetched as it did a couple months ago.
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