Harvard's Robotic Bees Generate High-Tech Buzz

coondoggie writes "Harvard researchers recently got a $10 million grant to create a colony of flying robotic bees, or RoboBees, to (among other things) spur innovation in ultra-low-power computing and electronic 'smart' sensors; and refine coordination algorithms to manage multiple, independent machines. The 5-year, National Science Foundation-funded RoboBee project could lead to a better understanding of how to mimic artificially the unique collective behavior and intelligence of a bee colony; foster novel methods for designing and building an electronic surrogate nervous system able to sense and adapt to changing environments; and advance work on the construction of small-scale flying mechanical devices, according to the Harvard RoboBee Web site."

Missing an important benefit

[Iamthecheese]

They really should be trying to find something else: more reliable pollination. Yes real bees already do this but mass-produced robo-bees, besides being really cool, don't catch colony-dropping diseases.

Re:Missing an important benefit

[religious freak]

mass-produced robo-bees ... don't catch colony-dropping diseases

Who says? The minute a viable robo-bee is created, I'm guessing someone will be thinking up a robo-bee virus. (In fact, a robo-bee virus actually sounds kinda cool!)

Re:Missing an important benefit

[camperslo]

They really should be trying to find something else: more reliable pollination.

Yes! Perhaps they can even make a variety good at pollinating cherimoya. Apparently South America has some bugs absent in the U.S., so most have to resort to hand-pollination with a small brush or something to get good yields from a cherimoya tree. The fruit is delightful.

Military applications?

[RNLockwood]

This appears to have military applications, say a swarm of cheap cruise missiles that any country could afford. Other than that it is way cool.

Re:Democratizing power of tech

[anagama]

I've been thinking similar things, and although I would be loathe to go back to the days of having to head down to the library and look through cards to find a book that answers a question I can get an answer for from google in seconds, the search trail I leave says a lot about me. Anyone who actually played around with the AOL search data realizes this.

My first thought when thinking about a network of tiny robots, was that someone in some government in this world will definitely turn this into a surveillance and data gathering tool. So while I love technology and the ease it brings to my life, I am also becoming more aware that my privacy is at much greater risk now than it was even as recently as the early/middle 90s. As technology becomes more pervasive, the ability to abuse it becomes more pervasive and I'm worried about that, in a non-Luddite fashion.

Re:"Ultra" low power

[mirix]

They'll just start adding them together.
UltraUltra low power
UltraSuperMicroMini low power
PicoPicoPicoPicoPower

Or we could skip all that and do what ST does; Embellish a bit and call it "zeropower" (which is trademarked no less).

Zeropower NVRAM [st.com] - Which of course is battery backed, and uses... power.

Re:Military applications?

[TwistedGreen]

Exploding bees? That doesn't seem very useful given the small payload capacity. A more practical military application would be in targeted chemical/biological warfare. A sentry hive placed outside a military outpost could sniff intruders for a chemical friend-or-foe signature and, if it's absent, they could attack. This could even be used as a non-lethal weapon if the robotic insects injected a paralytic agent rather than a toxin.

The military applications are actually extremely interesting!