Robotic Bees Take Flight

ORIGINAL: Time

Photo: http://micro.seas.harvard.edu/

Engineers at Harvard's Microrobotics Lab are designing what may be the future of plant pollination—robotic bees. These RoboBees are about the size of a penny and may eventually be used for surveillance and environmental monitoring.

The Harvard Monolithic Bee is a millimeter-scale flapping wing robotic insect produced using Printed Circuit MEMS (PC-MEMS) techniques. This video describes the manufacturing process, including pop-up book inspired assembly. This work was funded by the NSF, the Wyss Institute, and the ASEE. Music: D-Song by Bonobo

See "Monolithic fabrication of millimeter-scale machines" and "Pop-up book MEMS": https://micro.seas.harvard.edu/publications.html