MILES O'BRIEN: It all started
with a TV show, Silence of the
Bees, about honey bee
populations in steep decline.
Electrical engineers, Gu-Yeon
Wei and Rob Wood at Harvard
University, saw a challenge. And
so began the creation of the
Robobee, a miniature flying
robot.
ROB WOOD: Nothing is off the
shelf. And so we have to
develop all of the physical
components from scratch, it's
all of the things like how are
they going to talk to each
other, coordinate all the
algorithms for having a colony
of them working together. And
this set up is where we do all
our play tests.
MILES O'BRIEN: With support
from the National Science
Foundation and its program
called Expeditions in Computing,
Wood put together a diverse team
of collaborators to get the
Robobee project off the ground.
ROB WOOD: The Expeditions in
Computing program is looking for
new architectures for computing,
new ways of thinking about
different, important problems in
computer science.
MILES O'BRIEN: One challenge,
to design the tiny folding
exoskeleton that houses
the bee's wings,
motors and electronics.
ROB WOOD: Inspired, in a lot of
ways by children's pop-up
books. Where we can take a
variety of different materials
and layer them up and laminate
them together.
MILES O'BRIEN: Wei heads up the
team that's developing the
intricate, multi-tasking
computer chip brain.
GU-YEON WEI: We have different
regions of the chip responsible
for different things. We also
have an electronic nervous
system within the bee brain that
tells it to flap its wings.
MILES O'BRIEN: Power is another
issue. If the fuel source is too
heavy, the bee can't fly.
RON WOOD: We have a
collaborator that's making
micro-fuel cells that should be
much better than the batteries
that we're putting together.
GU-YEON WEI: There's so much
that goes into just achieving
what bees in nature just seem to
do without any effort.
MILES O'BRIEN: Now they're
hoping to build a colony of
interacting Robobees. There will
be no need for a queen bee, but
they do plan to design a hive
that will be used as a refueling
station. One day, a swarm of
these micro-robots could be
deployed to search for victims
after a disaster for example.
And even though that would be
years away, Wood says the
advancements they've made so far
are already creating quite a
buzz. For Science Nation,
I'm Miles O'Brien.
