Engineers Program Robotic Bees to Move and Think Like Bees

What Could Possibly Be Cooler Than RoboBee?
RoboBee X-Wing

Biomimicry is all the rage these days. And why not?

January 15, 2018

Why spend precious hours, weeks and months developing a new way of doing things when we can copy from the greatest innovator in the known universe—nature itself.That’s exactly what robotics researchers at Cornell University have been doing. 

Biomimicry is the field of research that involves drawing design cues from nature. When we think of biomimicry, we tend to think of machines that emulate the body kinematics of various creatures. Ornithopters are one of the older examples of that. But in fact, biomimicry can be applied not just to how a machine moves, but also how it thinks.Biomimicry is the field of research that involves drawing design cues from nature. When we think of biomimicry, we tend to think of machines that emulate the body kinematics of various creatures. Ornithopters are one of the older examples of that. But in fact, biomimicry can be applied not just to how a machine moves, but also how it thinks.

Engineers at Cornell’s Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Controls have discovered a way of shrinking down the computational power required for autonomous insect robots to detect changes to their environment and respond accordingly.

The amount of computer processing power needed for a robot to sense a gust of wind using tiny hair-like metal probes imbedded on its wings, adjust its flight accordingly and plan its path as it attempts to land on a swaying flower would require it to carry a desktop-size computer on its back.

Unlike traditional chips that process combinations of 0s and 1s as binary code, neuromorphic chips process spikes of electrical current that fire in complex combinations, similar to how neurons fire inside a brain. The lab is developing a new class of “event-based” sensing and control algorithms that mimic neural activity and can be implemented on neuromorphic chips. Because the chips require significantly less power than traditional processors, they allow engineers to pack more computation into the same payload. Effectively, with neuromorphic computer chips, engineers believe they are able to drastically reduce the size of that payload to the point that the computer can fit on the robo-insect itself.

The robo-insects are not just some mere flight of fancy (pun intended). They have been manufactured with the help of engineers from Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory, who have developed an 80-milligram flying RoboBee, as seen in the main image. These RoboBees are fitted with a number of vision, optical flow and motion sensors. The current version of RoboBee remains tethered to a power source, although the Harvard team is working on new mini power sources that will hopefully remove the dependency on a tether. The Cornell algorithms will help make RoboBee more autonomous and adaptable to complex environments without significantly increasing its weight.

“Getting hit by a wind gust or a swinging door would cause these small robots to lose control. We’re developing sensors and algorithms to allow RoboBee to avoid the crash or, if crashing, survive and still fly,” said Silvia Ferrari, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and director of the Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Controls. “You can’t really rely on prior modeling of the robot to do this, so we want to develop learning controllers that can adapt to any situation.”

As with all good engineering projects, development of RoboBee has been helped with the aid of simulation. In this case, a physics-based simulator was developed by one of the Cornell team’s doctoral students, Taylor Clawson. The simulator models the RoboBee and instantaneous aerodynamic forces it faces during each wing stroke. As a result, the model can accurately predict RoboBee’s motions during flights through complex environments. Clawson also is responsible for developing RoboBee’s autonomous flight controller, which uses biologically inspired programming that functions as a neural network.

“The simulation is used both in testing the algorithms and designing them,” Clawson said. “This network is capable of learning in real time to account for irregularities in the robot introduced during manufacturing, which make the robot significantly more challenging to control.”

Ferrari said her lab plans to help outfit RoboBee with new micro devices such as a camera, expanded antennae for tactile feedback, contact sensors on the robot’s feet and airflow sensors that look like tiny hairs.

This will bring RoboBee even closer to its biological counterpart in terms of functionality. 

Sounds suspiciously like the Black Mirror episode “Hated in the Nation.” Let’s hope they are used for pollination rather than assassination.

https://www.engineering.com/DesignerEdge/DesignerEdgeArticles/ArticleID/16195/Engineers-Program-Robotic-Bees-to-Move-and-Think-Like-Bees.aspx

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Harvard’s tiny, insect-inspired RoboBee X-Wing can fly using solar power

By Luke Dormehl — Posted on June 28, 2019

Size can matter when it comes to innovative flying machines — but bigger doesn’t necessarily equal better. Few robots illustrate that point better than Harvard University’s new RoboBee X-Wing: A winged drone that stands just 6.5 centimeters high and weighs only 259 milligrams. Boasting an insect-inspired design, RoboBee X-Wing takes to the sky by flapping its wings a dazzling 170 times per second. Oh, yes, and unlike other minuscule flying robots we’ve covered, it doesn’t have to be tethered to a power source to fly.

“This has been one of the major milestones in the development of insect-scale flying robots,” Noah Jafferis, a research associate in Materials Science and Mechanical Engineering in Harvard’s Wyss Institute, told Digital Trends. “Without onboard power, such vehicles have been confined to operate only in the lab. There is still much to be done to enable autonomous flight, however. Our next steps include integrating onboard sensing and control, and further improving vehicle performance to allow for operation in natural sunlight and include onboard batteries.”

At present, the solar-powered robot hasn’t taken to the skies in natural light because it requires around three times the intensity of sunlight to be able to fly. Nonetheless, as Jafferis notes, this is a crucial landmark in the field of diminutive flying robots.

RoboBee X-Wing is the sequel, of sorts, to a previous influential robot developed at Harvard called RoboBee. The main changes in the new vehicle design include the use of four wings instead of two, which increases efficiency by up to 30%, and improved actuator and transmission design, increasing lift by up to 38%. This provides enough payload to integrate and drive the electronics and solar cells needed to let the vehicle fly untethered.

“Applications of this robot are still a bit far off, but swarms of them could one day be used as distributed sensor networks for environmental monitoring and mapping confined spaces such as in disaster zones or archaeological sites,” Jafferis continued. “We also anticipate that the technologies developed to create this robot will be very useful for any other small scale devices that have extreme mass and power constraints, such as medical or space devices.”

A paper describing the research was recently published in the journal Nature.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/robobee-xwing-robot/?amp

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Here Come the RoboBees: Autonomous Flying Microrobots

Posted by News Editor in Latest News, RSS, Sci/Tech on February 19, 2019

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts, February 19, 2019 (ENS) – Inspired by the biology of a bee, researchers at the Wyss Institute have developed RoboBees – constructed systems that can do tasks such as pollinating crops, going on search and rescue missions or conducting climate and environmental monitoring.

A RoboBee measures about half the size of a paper clip, weighs less than one-tenth of a gram, and flies using artificial muscles. The tiny robots flap their wings using piezoelectric actuators – strips of ceramic that expand and contract when an electric field is applied.

A RoboBee can flap its wings at 120 times per second, achieving vertical takeoff, hovering, and steering. (Photo courtesy Wyss Institute)

With submillimeter-scale anatomy and two wafer-thin wings that flap at 120 times per second, RoboBees can achieve vertical takeoff, hovering, and steering.

Thin hinges of plastic embedded within a carbon fiber body frame serve as joints, and a delicately balanced control system commands the rotational motions in the flapping-wing robot, with each wing controlled independently in real time.

Modifications allow some models of RoboBee to transition from swimming underwater to flying, and to perch on surfaces using static electricity.

The RoboBee was motivated by the need to develop autonomous micro-aerial vehicles capable of self-contained, self-directed flight and of achieving coordinated behavior in large groups. To that end, the RoboBee development is broadly divided into three main components: Body, Brain, and Colony.

Body development consists of constructing robotic insects able to fly on their own with the help of a compact and seamlessly integrated power source.

Brain development is concerned with “smart” sensors and control electronics that mimic the eyes and antennae of a bee, and can sense and respond dynamically to the environment.

The Colony’s focus is about coordinating the behavior of many independent robots so they act as an effective unit.

“It’s really only because of this lab’s recent breakthroughs in manufacturing, materials, and design that we have even been able to try this. And it just worked, spectacularly well,” said engineering professor Robert Wood, a founding core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

This hybrid RoboBee can fly, dive into water, swim, propel itself back out of water, and safely land. (Photo courtesy Wyss Institute)

To construct RoboBees, researchers at the Wyss Institute developed innovative manufacturing methods, so-called Pop-Up microelectromechanical, MEM, technologies that have already expanded the boundaries of robotics design and engineering.

This manufacturing technique, inspired by pop-up books and origami, allows the fabrication of microrobots and electromechanical devices for industrial and medical applications, says Wood.

Recent decades have seen rapid development in the manufacture of microelectromechanical systems, MEMS, at the micrometer scale, mostly based on silicon wafer processing techniques, with characteristic length scales of millimeters to nanometers Wood explains.

Then, drawing inspiration from laminated printed circuit board manufacturing, Wyss Institute researchers developed a bulk-machined Pop-Up MEMS process for creating mesoscale machines up to several centimeters in dimension.

Wood said, “Our new techniques allow us to use any material including polymers, metals, ceramics, and composites. Along with integrated electronics, this means that we can generate full systems in any three-dimensional shape.”

Pop-up MEMS could enable the production of smart, minimally invasive surgical instruments, novel implantable medical devices, specialized optical systems and a variety of electromechanical devices, including complex microrobots on the scale of micrometers to centimeters like the Wyss Institute’s RoboBees.

Wyss researchers are currently pursuing the creation of endoscope and surgical instrument steering mechanisms deploying this manufacturing process.

https://ens-newswire.com/2019/02/19/here-come-the-robobees-autonomous-flying-microrobots/

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MATT SIMON | SCIENCE | 06.26.19

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE COOLER THAN ROBOBEE? ROBOBEE X-WING

ELIZA GRINNELL/HARVARD MICROROBOTICS LABORATORY

THEY USED TO call it RoboBee—a flying machine half the size of a paperclip that could flap its pair of wings 120 times a second. It was always tethered to a power source, limiting its freedom. Now, though, RoboBee becomes RoboBee X-Wing, as Harvard researchers have added solar cells and an extra pair of wings, freeing the robot to blast off to a galaxy far, far away. Or at least partway across the room, as it can sustain flight for only half a second, and only indoors.

But hey, baby steps. The teeniest of quadrotors measure a few inches across and weigh a third of an ounce. RoboBee X-Wing is about the same size as those untethered fliers, but weighs a hundredth of an ounce, which earns it the distinction of being the lightest aerial vehicle to manage sustained untethered flight. One day that could make it ideal for navigating tight, sensitive spaces in a galaxy very, very near.

Needless to say, the RoboBee X-Wing is far too frail to carry a battery, which would be several times heavier than the rest of the vehicle. So for the moment, the robot’s engineers are powering RoboBee X-Wing’s components by solar power directly. This comes from small solar cells perched on a rod well above the four wings, to avoid interrupting airflow. (The electronics are placed directly opposite the solar cells, beneath the robot, thus balancing the center of mass at the wings.)

Now, going from two wings to four isn’t like going from a fly to a dragonfly, which the robot now loosely resembles. In its previous iterations, RoboBee powered each wing with its own actuator, or motor, same as a fly. But where a dragonfly can manipulate each of its wings independently, the RoboBee’s two new wings are attached to the original two.

But why use four wings, when the original RoboBee got along perfectly fine with two? Doubling the surface area of RoboBee’s wings boosts its efficiency by 30 percent to compensate for the added weight of the solar cells and extra electronics. “Moving from two wings to four wings was really a factor of, how do we increase our lift without also increasing our power consumption?” says Harvard University engineer E. Farrell Helbling, coauthor of a new paper in Nature describing the upgraded robot. “So we can still stay within this regime where we can carry onboard power with such a limited payload capacity.”

Noah T. Jafferis and E. Farrell Helbling/ Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory

Testing in the lab, the researchers positioned lamps above the robot to shine down on its solar cells. Even then, RoboBee X-Wing could sustain flight only for half a second. So getting the robot out in the wild will require both the improvement of solar cell technology and the slimming down of batteries, especially if the robot wants to spend any time in the shade. That’s just to keep it airborne: At the moment, the robot can’t make sense of the world or understand its place in it. The small flier will also have to somehow compensate for wind. “Studying a system like this, it kind of forces us to think really, really hard about optimizing everything,” says Harvard robotist Noah Jafferis, lead author on the study.

This is especially important because physics is doing everything it can to pull your robot out of the air. “One of the fundamental challenges of winged flight is that, as you scale down further and further, you just have to be constantly flapping your wings,” says Nick Gravish, who studies the intersection of robotics and biology at UC San Diego and who was not involved in the new work, though he did his postdoc studies in this lab. “You really can't rely on the power savings you get from gliding around a bit and flapping your wings every once in a while.” Think about RoboBee as a hummingbird or, well, a bee, as opposed to an albatross, which uses its massive wings to float around on oceanic updrafts, thus saving energy.
This is where taking inspiration from nature gets really interesting. Engineers couldn’t possibly copy an insect one for one—all the muscles and neurons and structures like wings. And really, they don’t even need to, because they can reinvent animals in robotic form. Actuators substitute for muscles, solar cells substitute for an insect fueling itself with food, and so on.

“We always have these constraints that insects don't have, and insects have different constraints that we don't have as engineers,” says Matěj Karásek of the Delft University of Technology, whose own flying robot can bank and dive like a fruit fly. “Even if we are trained to take inspiration from nature, the solutions we come up with are slightly different.”

While RoboBee X-Wing is nowhere near matching the capabilities of a real insect, one day it could exceed them. Better actuators will make the robot faster and more nimble, and better solar cells will theoretically let the robot operate indefinitely. That would make it ideal for environmental monitoring or for flying in sensitive settings. After all, at just two inches long, it wouldn’t do too much damage if it crashed.

Plus, the small-scale engineering that went into RoboBee X-Wing could spread to other technologies. “Yes, it's interesting for our individual robot,” Helbling says, “but these things could also be applied to other small devices, like medical devices, or other areas where you want something to be in the centimeter or millimeter scale. I think it's really an area to explore.”

May the force be with you, little RoboBee X-Wing.

https://www.wired.com/story/robobee-x-wing/
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