INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
The RoboBee is only slightly larger than a penny.
Credit:
Harvard Microrobotics
Laboratory
The first step was to perform experiments to determine the effects of oscillation on the newly designed
robotic legs and leg joints
This involved manually disturbing the leg and then releasing it, capturing the resulting oscillations on high-speed video
This showed that the leg and joint essentially acted as an "underdamped spring-mass-damper model," with a bit of "viscoelastic creep" for
Next, the team performed a series of free-fall experiments with small fiberglass crash-test dummy vehicles with mass and inertia similar to
RoboBee's, capturing each free fall on high-speed video
This was followed by tests of different takeoff and landing approaches.The final step was running experiments on consecutive takeoff and
landing sequences using RoboBee, with the little robot taking off from one leaf, hovering, then moving laterally before hovering briefly and
landing on another leaf nearby
The basic setup was the same as prior experiments, with the exception of placing a plant branch in the motion capture arena
RoboBee was able to safely land on the second leaf (or similar uneven surfaces) over repeated trials with varying parameters.Going forward,
Wood's team will seek to further improve the mechanical damping upon landing, drawing lessons from stingless bees and mosquitoes, as well as
scaling up to larger vehicles
This would require an investigation into more complex leg geometries, per the authors
And RoboBee still needs to be tethered to off-board control systems
surveillance, or swarms of RoboBees engaged in artificial pollination.Science Robotics, 2025
