Scale Model Robot Bee Tests Flight Theories
Posted on November 29th, 2005 in Latest News
Guardian Unlimited has a short piece on Michael Dickinson’s lab at California Institute of Technology, where he researches bees and other flying insects abilities to fly. Here’s an older video of Dickinson telling why he studies flies. In some of their latest research:
The constructed a robotic scale model of the fly’s wing and found that the maximum thrust happened at the end, middle, and start of the flapping motion.
Dickinson hopes to create a fully robotic, life-size bee for military applications. The thought of these doing surveillance is even scarier than the spy drones from Honeywell that everyone was talking about.
They found that a
honeybee typically flaps its one-centimetre-long wings 240 times a
second, each beat covering an arc of only 90 degrees. Other insects
flap at no more than 200 times a second, with each stroke beating over
a 165-degree arc.
The constructed a robotic scale model of the fly’s wing and found that the maximum thrust happened at the end, middle, and start of the flapping motion.
Dickinson hopes to create a fully robotic, life-size bee for military applications. The thought of these doing surveillance is even scarier than the spy drones from Honeywell that everyone was talking about.
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June 9th, 2008 at 21:16
What a wonderful thing you are doing for the technological growth and advancement of this type of technology. As a beekeeper, a robtic Queen bee needs to be designed capable of bringing swarms out of hives in buildings into a super.
Think about it…
Would be a great project and would render great help in such cases. And save home owners alot of money for damages to remove bees otherwise without pesticides. We are trying to save our bees. Pesticides and the general public are not bee friendly. But, unfortunately the general public does not understand, “Kill the bees and food production goes way down”
April 22nd, 2009 at 04:16
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February 21st, 2012 at 12:39
I would like to start laerning about robotics and am horribly uneducated. How can I learn to make a giant four foot long robot bee. Someone e mail me about the learning process. Don’t know where to start.
February 22nd, 2012 at 13:42
First step is to figure out what you want it to do (if you want it to actually fly by flapping its wings – there’s not procedure out there). If you want it to fly and “look like” a bee, there are R/C airplane kits like that. If it’s intended to stay on the ground and slowly move parts, you need to check out the lesson “Making sense of actuators” to figure out what you need.