Harvard's RoboBees Can Now Perch During Flight

Posted on May 19, 2016

Harvard RoboBees can now perch during flight. The tiny lightweight flying robots use static electricity to land and stick to surfaces.

The Harvard roboticists mounted an electrostatically charged pad on top of a RoboeBee. This gave the robot the ability to reversibly stick to existing elevated perches, such as a leaf. The entire mechanism weighs 13.4 mg, bringing the total weight of the robot to about 100mg. This about the weight of an actual bee. Sticking to a surface is beneficial because uses much less power than hovering. The patch requires about 1000 times less power to perch than it does to hover.

Moritz Graule, first author of the paper who conducted this research as a student at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, says in a statement, "Many applications for small drones require them to stay in the air for extended period. Unfortunately, smaller drones run out of energy quickly. We want to keep them aloft longer without requiring too much additional energy."

Take a look:

A research paper on the perching RoboBees was published here in the journal, Science. Harvard first announced the robotic insects in 2013. They can also dive and swim underwater, see here.



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