9781422282892

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Introduction

flowering crops adapting to changes in the environment.Moreover, theywill be able to communicate with one another, just as real bees dowhen they scout and forage for food. On the Fly In creating the RoboBee, researchers had to study how real insects—namely the housefly—took flight.They also had to find out why some insects, like the honeybee, are able towork in groups.As they gained this knowledge, engineers began designing computer algorithms to mimic these and other behaviors. Eventually RoboBees will be able to use this software to coordinate simple tasks, such as where to fly and what flower on which to land. “If you want to make something a cen- timeter big that can fly, several hundred thousand solutions already exist in nature,” Robert Wood, an electrical en- gineer at Harvard’s Microbotics Lab,

Flight of the RoboBee

In designing the RoboBee, scien- tists studied high-speed videos of insects in flight to understand how the bugs’ wings worked. From these videos, scientists learned that as an insect’s wings flap, a vortex of air, similar to a tornado, forms along the edge of the wing. The spinning causes air pressure to drop above the wings, while increasing air pressure below the wings. As that happens, air is pushed up, and the bug begins to fly. To keep the bug moving through the air, the insect’s wings rotate as it prepares to flap its wings in the opposite direction. That creates a force similar to backspin on a ping-pong ball. As that rotation occurs, it pulls a faster moving column of air over the top of the wing that strikes the swirling vortex created by the previous wing stroke, generating an additional upward or downward force.

told National Geographic . “We don’t just copy nature. We try to understand the what, how, and why behind an organism’s anatomy, movement, and behavior, and then translate that into engineering terms.”