A robot capable of imitating the bee to perfection

2023-06-05 12:53:14

A team from Washington State University presents a prototype of a flying robot imitating the most complex movements of a bee. Equipped with six degrees of freedom, it notably knows how to pivot horizontally on a vertical axis.

It is called Bee++, “Bee plus plus”, so well does this robot manage to imitate the intricacies of the insect’s flight. This prototype is a project of a team from Washington State University and was presented at the last international conference on robotics and automation in London, which took place from May 29 to June 2, 2023.

Equipped with four wings in carbon fiber and polyester film, with a wingspan of 3.3 cm, this machine is capable of flying in all directions. A first for a robot of this type and of a size equivalent to that of the real insect (it weighs however much heavier). It can pivot on its three axes, which gives it six degrees of freedom. It thus performs pitch and roll movements and, this is the real performance, the so-called “yaw” movement, namely a horizontal rotation around the vertical axis. A maneuver “indispensable and among the most impressive” in insects, the research paper believes.

The yaw, an essential and impressive maneuver

The robot is piloted via four controllers, each being assigned independently of the others to one of the four wings. Thus, it becomes possible to differentiate the beats of the front wings from that of the rear wings, or that of the left wings compared to the right wings. Yaw is obtained by synchronizing the beats of a pair of diagonally opposed wings: the right front wing and the left rear wing will beat differently from the left front wing and the right rear wing.

“Best results yet for an insect-sized winged flying robot”

To gain stability compared to other projects of this type, the team worked particularly hard on the design of the Bee++, getting as close as possible to the real insect, with a frequency of 100 to 160 beats per second. M[…]