EU News Digest Latest News & Updates
Photo: Mark Stone | University of Washington.
The UW team designed a sensor “backpack” that weighs 102 mg, about the weight of seven grains of rice.
“We decided to use bumblebees because they’re large enough to carry a tiny battery that can power our system,” said Iyer, a doctoral student in the UW Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Unlike man-made drones, bees can fly for hours and can also sense things that electronic objects cannot, Gollakota said.
“With a drone, you’re just flying around randomly,” he said, “while a bee is going to be drawn to specific things, like the plants it prefers to pollinate. And on top of learning about the environment, you can also learn a lot about how the bees behave.”
In September the UW research team plans to present their findings at ACM MobiCom 2019, an international forum dedicated to addressing the challenges in the areas of mobile computing and wireless and mobile networking.
This isn’t the first time the team has unveiled a method for insects in flight. Relying on funding from UW, last May they unveiled RoboFly, a robo-insect powered by an invisible laser beam that is pointed at a photovoltaic cell, which is attached above the robot and converts the laser light into enough electricity to operate its wings. But with its tiny battery the most it can do thus far is take off and land.
Nevertheless, the engineers don’t plan to abandon RoboFly, as there are many promising applications a robo-insect can handle that living IoT simply can’t. For one, RoboFly’s flight patterns can be controlled, meaning that someday, among other things, they will be able to sniff out gas leaks, swoop beneath plants to detect pests and disease and slip into tiny spaces to find disaster survivors.
