Harvard's RoboBee Can Now Dive and Swim Underwater

Posted on October 21, 2015

Harvard researchers have made it possible for their robotic insects, called RoboBees, to swim underwater. Harvard says the RoboBee is now the first insect-sized robot capable of flying and swimming.

The robots were first developed by researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard in 2013. Engineers at SEAS took a clue from puffins to turn the RoboBee into a swimming robot.

Kevin Chen, a graduate student in the Harvard Microrobotics Lab at SEAS, says in a statement, "Through various theoretical, computational and experimental studies, we found that the mechanics of flapping propulsion are actually very similar in air and in water. In both cases, the wing is moving back and forth. The only difference is the speed at which the wing flaps."

The researchers first had to solve the program of surface tension with RoboBee. The robot is too light to break the surface of the water so it has to hover over the water at an angle, switch of its wings, and then crash into the water in order to sink. During flight the tiny microrobot flaps its wings 120 times per second. The flap rate is lowered to 9 times per second when the robot is underwater.

Helbling, the paper's second author, says, "Water is almost 1,000 times denser than air and would snap the wing off the RoboBee if we didn't adjust its flapping speed."

Take a look:

The research was presented recently in a paper at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Germany.

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