At UC Berkeley, a team of researchers had fun recreating a bumblebee... in a robotic version. The result: a tiny machine that looks like a small white propeller and manages to fly wirelessly. Less than a centimeter in diameter, weighing a featherweight 21 milligrams, and yet, it is capable of changing direction, floating in the air and hitting a target.
A mechanical insect that fits in the palm of your hand
Unlike traditional drones that carry motors, batteries and sensors, this robot works without any of that. To allow it to take off, the researchers opted for for an ingenious solution: an external magnetic field. The robot contains two small magnets. When this field is applied, they attract and repel each other, which makes the propeller spin and allows the machine to rise. By playing with the strength of the field, we can make it go up, down, or move horizontally.
"Bees can do a lot of incredible things in flight, and until now, robots of this size were far from the mark," explains Liwei Lin, a professor at UC Berkeley and co-author of the study. "Here, we manage to direct it to a specific point, like a bee gathering pollen.»
The device doesn't yet have eyes or ears: it can't find its way on its own or react to its environment. A gust of wind would be enough to destabilize it. But researchers are already working on the next, more autonomous version. The goal: to integrate sensors so that it can correct its trajectory in real time.
This mini-robot could one day be used to pollinate crops or explore places inaccessible to conventional drones, such as the inside of pipes. It could also be used in medical applications. Wei Yue, one of the researchers involved, is developing other tiny robots, capable of crawling or rolling and cooperating with each other. Injected into the body, they could work together to unblock an artery.
The team also hopes to further reduce the robot's size, to less than a millimeter. At this scale, it could be controlled with radio waves. And who knows, one day, we might see a swarm of these mini-machines working in groups, like a colony of insects... but in a high-tech version.
0 Comments