Can be bees replaced by microbots in the future? Depending on research that has been conducted in modern technology and innovation innovation centers in the United States, the answer is yes. Although not the plan of scientists that this exchange happens in all situations, there are plans to use these tiny drones for crops in closed locations and even mechanical pollination in inhospitable environments such as the surface of Mars.
These research has advanced at a time when factors such as global warming add to the indiscriminate use of chemicals in agriculture – to fight pests – and endanger the survival of bees. These flying insects play a key role, flying from flower to flower, to collect nectar and pollen. This pollination allows the intersection between male and female gametes of plants, ensuring the production of vegetables, fruits and seeds.
The idea of centers such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is to promote a more efficient method of artificial pollination, allowing farmers in the future to cultivate fruits and vegetables within warehouses at various levels, increasing productivity and mitigating some of the harmful impacts of agriculture in the environment.
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And for that, researchers are developing robotic insects that can once get out of mechanical hives to quickly perform precise pollination. The difficulty has always been to reproduce in the laboratory the resistance, speed and maneuverability that bees have.
Recently, scientists have announced that, inspired by the anatomy of natural pollinating insects, they have managed to review original projects to produce tiny air robots that are much more agile and durable than previous versions.
The new bots, according to a MIT publication, can turn to about 1,000 seconds, which is more than 100 times the result obtained in previous versions. The robotic insect, which weighs less than a paper clip, can fly significantly faster than similar bots while completing acrobatic maneuvers such as double airlines.
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The renewed robot is designed to increase the accuracy and agility of the flight, minimizing mechanical stress in its artificial wing push -ups, allowing faster maneuvers, greater resistance and a longer service life.
This new design also has enough free space so that the robot can carry small batteries or sensors, which can allow him to fly alone outside the laboratory.
“The amount of flight we demonstrate in this article is probably larger than all the amount of flight our field has been able to accumulate with these robotic insects. With the useful life and the accuracy of this robot, we are approaching some very interesting applications, such as assisted pollination,” said in an associate professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).
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Chen is accompanied in the article by the main co-authors Suhan Kim and Yi-hsuan Hsiao, who are EECS postgraduate students; as well as the postgraduate student at EECS Zhijian Ren and the summer visiting student Jiashu Huang. The survey was released at Science Robotics.
At CNN, Yi-Hsuan “Nemo”, a doctoral student, said researchers expect these robots to help with artificial pollination even on other planets. “If you are going to cultivate something on Mars, you will probably not want to take many natural insects to pollination,” joked Hsiao. “That’s where our robot could potentially take action,” he explained.
The article explained that the movement of robot wings is driven by artificial muscles., Made of layers of elastomer press between two very thin carbon nanotubes electrodes and then wrapped in a soft cylinder. The actuators are compressed and stretch quickly, generating the mechanical force that hits the wings.
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In previous projects, when actuator movements reach the extremely high frequencies necessary for the flight, the devices usually began to bend. This reduced robot power and efficiency. New transmissions inhibit this flexion-flambing movement, which reduces tension to the artificial muscles and allows them to apply more strength to beat the wings. The new robot reached an average speed of 35 centimeters per second.
Now they also want to improve the accuracy of robots so they can land and take off from the center of a flower. In the long run, researchers hope to install small batteries and sensors on air robots so they can fly and navigate out of the laboratory.
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In addition to MIT, the Harvard University Wyss Institute is also developing the “robobees”, not only for agriculture applications, but for disaster help, for example. According to a publication, these projects are divided into three main components: the body, the brain and the colony.
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“Body development consists in the construction of robotic insects capable of flying on its own with the help of a compact and perfectly integrated energy source; brain development is concerned with ‘intelligent’ and electronic control that mimic the eyes and antennas of a bee and may feel and respond dynamically to the environment; the focus of the colony is to coordinate the behavior of many independent robots,” the text says.
These tiny robots beat the wings using piezoelectric actuators – ceramic strips that expand and contract when an electric field is applied. Thin hinges of plastic embedded in a carbon fiber structure serves as joints, and a delicately balanced control system commands the rotational movements in the beating wing robot, with each wing controlled independently in real time.
Robobees applications may include distributed environmental monitoring, search and rescue operations and culture pollination assistance.
