Robotic Bee? This Novel Four-Winged Robot Can Fully Fly in All Directions

Researchers from Washington State University were able to develop a robotic bee that is capable of fully flying in all directions.

Robotic Bee

Science Daily reports that the robotic bee is armed with four wings that consist of mylar and carbon fiber. It also has four different lightweight actuators for controlling each wing.

This Bee++ prototype is the first to stably fly in all and any direction. Its movement includes twisting motions called yaw. The robot can also fully pull off the six-degree free movement that is typically displayed by a flying insect.

The novel work was reported in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics journal. For over three decades, researchers have been trying to come up with artificial insects that fly, as lead researcher Néstor O. Pérez-Arancibia notes. Pérez-Arancibia is a Flaherty associate professor from the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at WSU, during the ongoing IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

Such robotics may be utilized for several applications, such as artificial pollination, biological research, search and rescue efforts in spaces that are tight, and environmental monitoring. However, to come up with small robots that take off and land, the development of controllers that work like an insect brain is necessary.

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Initially, researchers came up with a robotic bee that had two wings. However, this robot had limited movement.

Pérez-Arancibia and a duo of PhD students were then able to make a four-winged robotic bee for the first time in 2019. This innovation was light enough for it to take off. The researchers made its frontal wing have a different flap in order for it to perform maneuvers called rolling or pitching. Its frontal wing is different from its back one for pitching. The right wing's flap, on the other hand, was different from the left one for rolling. This produces a torque that orbits a robot about its two primary horizontal axes.

It is important, however, for the yaw motion to be controlled. Without this, the robot ends up uncontrollably spinning and being unable to have a singular focal point. The robot then ends up crashing. Hence, being unable to control the yaw limits the robot.

Aside from this, it is also critical for movement to be feasible in all degrees when it comes to object tracking or evasive maneuvers.

To enable the bot to have a controlled twist, the scientists got an insect cue and moved the wings so they would flap in a plane that was specifically angled. They also boosted the frequency, from 100 flaps to 160 flaps per second and came up with a new design for the robot's controller, which serves as the brain of the device.

Robotic Bee vs. Real Bee

According to Interesting Engineering, the Bee++ robot weighs 95 milligrams and has a wingspan of roughly 33 millimeters. This makes it much bigger than real bees, which weigh roughly 10 milligrams. The Bee++ can only spend five minutes at a time flying autonomously. Hence, the robot is mostly linked to a cable that connects it to a power source.

The researchers plan to develop other insect robot types, such as water strider and crawler robots.

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