If you think drones are scary now, wait till they’re small enough to fly up your nose. The folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) already have them stashed away in their lab and they’re getting closer to being a functional device. Or rather, a swarm of them.
Much like those Chinese drone shows that are totally not a display of future military potential, the insect-sized drones are capable of moving in a swarming formation. Their intent is also not supposed to be military but we’re almost certain some dingbat will figure out a way to weaponise teeny-tiny drones.
MIT’s mighty mites
The little insect-sized drones were designed as a method of mechanically pollinating plants in much the same manner as bees currently do. Since the bees aren’t doing so well (seriously, start a hive at home), the brains at MIT hope to install mechanical hives capable of performing pollination. There are ups and downs to this idea.
The dinky four-winged flying robots could get to their task without (for lack of a better term) bumbling around but they don’t have the endurance of their insect counterparts. But MIT has made strides in that latter direction. It recently improved the design of its insect overlords, bumping up flight time from about ten seconds to 1,000 seconds.
That’s about 17 minutes if you arbitrarily divide it by sixty, as humans do. It’s not enough to let the little critters take over the care of your rose garden just yet but it’s about on par with consumer drones when they first appeared on the scene. Those sold well enough but it’s doubtful that you’ll find MIT’s insect swarms at retail soon.
Bee my friend
Kevin Chen, associate professor at MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the head of its Soft and Micro Robotics Laboratory, said, “Compared to the old robot, we can now generate control torque three times larger than before, which is why we can do very sophisticated and very accurate path-finding flights.”
Despite its leaps forward, it still lags behind nature in terms of performance. (Seriously, build that hive at home). “The wings of bees are finely controlled by a very sophisticated set of muscles. That level of fine-tuning is something that truly intrigues us, but we have not yet been able to replicate,” Chen added.
The next steps for the project include more precise control of the robotic insect swarm, getting them functional enough to fly outside (they currently only fly in a lab), and upping the flight time to at least 10,000 seconds. That is about an hour and 45 minutes in arbitrary Earth measurements.
