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Flight Of The Robobee
Narrator: This is Robert Wood. He loves robots
Robert Wood: So I want to begin with a bold statement that robotics is the next Internet. It's the next big thing to impact our lives in areas from medicine to even things like space exploration. The more traditional view of robotics is big, rigid, very powerful, very dangerous …but in this case we're making things smaller, perhaps faster, certainly cheaper than more traditional robotic systems. We are constructing robots the size of insects. We use nature to inspire the robots that we build. This is of a carpenter bee. And as an engineer, I can look at this and start to ask some really well-posed questions, you know like "how are the wings moving?”
Our team is working on creating a colony of autonomous robotic bees [Text on screen]
Robobees are autonomous They can fly independently Robert Wood: We envision this, twenty or so years down the road, when these things actually exist, they can be quite useful for applications where you wouldn't want to put a human or an animal—hazardous environment exploration, search and rescue, space exploration, assisted agriculture…
[Text on screen] The tiny robots will help explorers, doctors, and even farmers Robert Wood: There's all these really interesting open questions that must be solved if you’re gonna achieve this goal. We have to build everything from scratch从头做起. How many Robobees have we crashed? Ah, all of them! We build, we test. We build, we test. If you don’t fail, you don't learn enough. For everything that works, there's tens or hundreds of things that don't
[Text on screen] Robobees work together like real bees Just like real bees, every Robobee has a iob to do Robert Wood: Now you have this concept where you have not just one all-capable robot, but you have a bunch of not very good robots. The idea is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
[Text on screen] If you want to make something fly, a solution already exists in nature —Robert Wood |
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