Credit: SCAD

Beginning in 2006 beekeepers became aware that their honeybee populations were dying off at increasingly rapid rates. Scientists are also concerned about the dwindling populations of monarch butterflies. Researchers have been scrambling to come up with explanations and an effective strategy to save both insects or replicate their pollination functions in agriculture.

Photo: SCAD

Although the Plan Bee drones pictured above are just one SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) student’s concept for how a swarm of drones could handle pollinating an indoor crop, scientists are considering different options for dealing with the crisis, using modern technology to replace living bees with robotic ones.Researchers from the Wyss Institute and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard introduced the first RoboBees in 2013, and other scientists around the world have been researching and designing their solutions ever since.

Honeybees pollinate almost a third of all the food we consume and, in the U.S., account for more than $15 billion worth of crops every year. Apples, berries, cucumbers and almonds rely on bees for their pollination. Butterflies also pollinate, but less efficiently than bees and mostly they pollinate wildflowers.

The National Academy of Sciences said:

“Honey bees enable the production of no fewer than 90 commercially grown crops as part of the large, commercial, beekeeping industry that leases honey bee colonies for pollination services in the United States.

Although overall honey bee colony numbers in recent years have remained relatively stable and sufficient to meet commercial pollination needs, this has come at a cost to beekeepers who must work harder to counter increasing colony mortality rates.”

Florida and California have been hit especially hard by decreasing bee colony populations. In 2006, California produced nearly twice as much honey as the next state. But in 2011, California’s honey production fell by nearly half. The recent severe drought in California has become an additional factor driving both its honey yield and bee numbers down as less rain means less flowers available to pollinate.

In the U.S., the Obama Administration created a task force which developed The National Pollinator Health Strategy plan to:

• Restore honey bee colony health to sustainable levels by 2025.
• Increase Eastern monarch butterfly populations to 225 million butterflies by year 2020.
• Restore or enhance seven million acres of land for pollinators over the next five years.

For this story, I wrote to the EPA specialist for bee pollination asking whether funding was continuing under the Trump Administration or whether the program itself was to be continued. No answer.

Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology scientists have invented a drone that transports pollen between flowers using horsehair coated in a special sticky gel. And scientists at the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex (UK) are attempting to produce the first accurate model of a honeybee brain, particularly those portions of the brain that enable vision and smell. Then they intend to create a flying robot able to sense and act as autonomously as a bee.

Bottom Line:

As novel and technologically interesting as these inventions may be, the metrics will need to be near to the present costs of pollination. Or, as biologist Dave Goulson said to a Popular Science reporter, “Even if bee bots are really cool, there are lots of things we can do to protect bees instead of replacing them with robots.”

Saul Cunningham, of the Australian National University, confirmed that sentiment by showing that today’s concepts are far from being economically feasible:

“If you think about the almond industry, for example, you have orchards that stretch for kilometres and each individual tree can support 50,000 flowers,” he says. “So the scale on which you would have to operate your robotic pollinators is mind-boggling.”

“Several more financially viable strategies for tackling the bee decline are currently being pursued including better management of bees through the use of fewer pesticides, breeding crop varieties that can self-pollinate instead of relying on cross-pollination, and the use of machines to spray pollen over crops.”

In this image, VAMPs are shown actuated and cut open in cross section. The cross section shows the inner chambers that collapse when vacuum is applied. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University.

To make robots more cooperative and have them perform tasks in close proximity to humans, they must be softer and safer. A new actuator developed by a team led by George Whitesides, Ph.D. — who is a Core Faculty member at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) – generates movements similar to those of skeletal muscles using vacuum power to automate soft, rubber beams.

Like real muscles, the actuators are soft, shock absorbing, and pose no danger to their environment or humans working collaboratively alongside them or the potential future robots equipped with them. The work was reported June 1 in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies.

“Functionally, our actuator models the human bicep muscle,” said Whitesides, who is also a Director of the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology at Harvard University. “There are other soft actuators that have been developed, but this one is most similar to muscle in terms of response time and efficiency.”

Whitesides’ team took an unconventional approach to its design, relying on vacuum to decrease the actuator’s volume and cause it to buckle. While conventional engineering would consider bucking to be a mechanical instability and a point of failure, in this case the team leveraged this instability to develop VAMPs (vacuum-actuated muscle-inspired pneumatic structures). Whereas previous soft actuators rely on pressurized systems that expand in volume, VAMPs mimic true muscle because they contract, which makes them an attractive candidate for use in confined spaces and for a variety of purposes.

The actuator — comprising soft rubber or ‘elastomeric’ beams — is filled with small, hollow chambers of air like a honeycomb. By applying vacuum the chambers collapse and the entire actuator contracts, generating movement. The internal honeycomb structure can be custom tailored to enable linear, twisting, bending, or combinatorial motions.

VAMPs are functionally modeled after the human bicep, similar to the biological muscle in terms of response time and efficiency. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

“Having VAMPs built of soft elastomers would make it much easier to automate a robot that could be used to help humans in the service industry,” said the study’s first author Dian Yang, who was a graduate researcher pursuing his Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences at Harvard during the time of the work, and is now a Postdoctoral Researcher.

The team envisions that robots built with VAMPs could be used to assist the disabled or elderly, to serve food, deliver goods, and perform other tasks related to the service industry. What’s more, soft robots could make industrial production lines safer, faster, and quality control easier to manage by enabling human operators to work in the same space.

Although a complex control system has not yet been developed for VAMPs, this type of actuation is easy to control due to its simplicity: when vacuum is applied, VAMPs will contract. They could be used as part of a tethered or untethered system depending on environmental or performance needs. Additionally, VAMPs are designed to prevent failure — even when damaged with a 2mm hole, the team showed that VAMPs will still function. In the event that major damage is caused to the system, it fails safely.

“It can’t explode, so it’s intrinsically safe,” said Whitesides.

Here, a VAMPs lifts a 500 gram weight with ease. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

Whereas other actuators powered by electricity or combustion could cause damage to humans or their surroundings, loss of vacuum pressure in VAMPs would simply render the actuator motionless.

“These self-healing, bioinspired actuators bring us another step closer to being able to build entirely soft-bodied robots, which may help to bridge the gap between humans and robots and open entirely new application areas in medicine and beyond,” said Wyss Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., who is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and the Boston Children’s Hospital Vascular Biology Program, as well as Professor of Bioengineering at Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

In addition to Whitesides and Yang, other authors on the study included: Mohit S. Verma, Ph.D.,(FAS); Ju-Hee So, Ph.D., (FAS); Bobak Mosadegh, Ph.D., (Wyss, FAS); Christoph Keplinger, Ph.D., (FAS); Benjamin Lee (FAS); Fatemeh Khashai (FAS); Elton Lossner (FAS), and Zhigang Suo, Ph.D., (SEAS, Kavli Institute).

Source: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

In the Disruptive Podcast series, Terrence McNally speaks directly with Wyss Institute researchers, exploring what motivates them and how they envision our future as might be impacted by their disruptive technologies. In part 2 of the Disruptive: Bioinspired Robotics episode, Wyss Founding Core Faculty Member Robert Wood discusses new manufacturing techniques that are enabling popup and soft robots.

Wood is developing biologically inspired aerial and terrestrial microrobots, soft-bodied robots, and “printable” robots. His current research interests include new micro- and meso-scale manufacturing techniques, fluid mechanics of low Reynolds number flapping wings, control of sensor-limited and computation-limited systems, active soft materials, and morphable soft-bodied robots. He leads a team of over 40 researchers on the National Science Foundation (NSF) “RoboBees” project to develop coordinated colonies of autonomous robotic bees.

His group is also building agile ambulatory robots that are inspired by insects and centipedes. The long-term goal is to create a swarm of robotic insects capable of performing important tasks, such as search and rescue, hazardous environmental explorations, and pollination. Wood is collaborating with a diverse set of researchers at the Wyss who are exploring soft-bodied autonomous robots and soft devices for human-robot interaction and rehabilitation. One of these projects, called “Second Skin,” is a system in which sensing, actuation, and control mechanisms are embedded in soft devices that can be worn by patients with neuromuscular disorders to help them regain function. Wood is also working on novel manufacturing processes for “printable robots” with the goal of automating robot development and creating new methods for rapid prototyping complex electromechanical devices.

Source: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

In the Disruptive Podcast series, Terrence McNally speaks directly with Wyss Institute researchers, exploring what motivates them and how they envision our future as might be impacted by their disruptive technologies. In part 1 of the Disruptive: Bioinspired Robotics podcast episode, Wyss Founding Core Faculty Member Radhika Nagpal discusses swarm collectives, as well as the challenges faced by women in the engineering and computer science fields.

Nagpal is developing programming paradigms that enable new types of robotic systems to mimic the collective behaviors of living creatures. Inspired by bee swarms and termite colonies, she is applying nature’s approach to decentralized cooperation to engineer new collective systems that meet real-world challenges. Biological systems, from embryos to social insects, depend upon the coordinated behavior of large numbers of individual agents to achieve highly complex outcomes — termites build skyscrapers and embryonic cells develop into healthy babies. Nagpal is building new types of distributed systems — from multi-modular robots and robot swarms, to vast sensor networks — that have similar capabilities.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Thousand-robot swarm self-assembles into arbitrary shapes
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about – 2015
• #153: Robots Podcast: Termite-Inspired Construction
• Crowdsourcing new strategies for cancer treatment: Towards swarming nanobots

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

By Leah Burrows | SEAS Communications

Engineers have been trying to design functional aerial-aquatic vehicles for decades with little success. The biggest challenge is conflicting design requirements: aerial vehicles require large airfoils like wings or sails to generate lift while underwater vehicles need to minimize surface area to reduce drag.

To solve this, engineers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University took a clue from puffins. The birds with flamboyant-colored beaks are one of nature’s most adept hybrid locomotors, employing similar flapping motions to propel themselves through air as well as through water to dive for fish.

“Through various theoretical, computational and experimental studies, we found that the mechanics of flapping propulsion are actually very similar in air and in water,” said Kevin Chen, a graduate student in the Harvard Microrobotics Lab at SEAS. “In both cases, the wing is moving back and forth. The only difference is the speed at which the wing flaps.”

RoboBee: From Aerial to Aquatic from Wyss Institute on Vimeo.

Applying this in the lab, the team of researchers at SEAS and Wyss have demonstrated the first flying, swimming, insect-like robot — paving the way for future duel aerial aquatic robotic vehicles. The aerial-aquatic robot is an adaptation of the previously developed “RoboBee”, a microrobot smaller than a paperclip that flies and hovers like an insect, flapping its tiny, nearly invisible wings 120 times per second.

The new research was presented recently in a paper at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Germany, where first author Chen accepted the award for best student paper. The paper was co-authored by SEAS/Wyss graduate student Farrell Helbling, SEAS/Wyss postdoctoral fellows Nick Gravish and Kevin Ma, and Robert J. Wood, who is the founder of the Harvard Microrobotics Lab, the Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at SEAS, and a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute.

In order to make the transition from air to water, the team first had to solve the problem of surface tension. The RoboBee, designed in Wood’s lab, is so small and lightweight that it cannot break the surface tension of the water. To overcome this hurdle, the RoboBee hovers over the water at an angle, momentarily switches off its wings, and crashes unceremoniously into the water in order to sink.

Next, the team had to account for water’s increased density. “Water is almost 1,000 times denser than air and would snap the wing off the RoboBee if we didn’t adjust its flapping speed,” said Helbling, the paper’s second author.

The team lowered the wing speed from 120 flaps per second to nine but kept the flapping mechanisms and hinge design the same. A swimming RoboBee changes its direction by adjusting the stroke angle of the wings, the same way it does in air. Like a flying version, it is still tethered to a power source. The team prevented the RoboBee from shorting by using deionized water and coating the electrical connections with glue.

While this RoboBee can move seamlessly from air to water, it cannot yet transition from water to air. Solving that design challenge is the next phase of the research, according to Chen.

“What is really exciting about this research is that our analysis of flapping-wing locomotion is not limited to insect-scaled vehicles,” said Chen. “From millimeter-scaled insects to meter-scaled fishes and birds, flapping locomotion spans a range of sizes. This strategy has the potential to be adapted to larger aerial-aquatic robotic designs.”

“Bioinspired robots, such as the RoboBee, are invaluable tools for a host of interesting experiments — in this case on the fluid mechanics of flapping foils in different fluids,” said Wood. “This is all enabled by the ability to construct complex devices that faithfully recreate some of the features of organisms of interest.”

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

Robert J. Wood (see also), Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and a Core Member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, and recently in the news in connection with a novel fabrication technique developed by his group at the Harvard Microrobotics Lab, has been awarded an Alan T. Waterman Award. He appears in the above video in an interview format with the interviewer’s questions edited out.