In developing robots, researchers busy as bees

Thanks to this university's researchers, soldiers in combat zones may be able to get help from an unlikely source: bees.

The insects won't be helping directly on the battlefield, but researchers at the engineering school are studying how bees move. The researchers are working to develop small robotic systems that could assist in surveillance and search and rescue missions, according to Sean Humbert, an assistant professor who directs the school's autonomous vehicle laboratory.

The researchers release honey bees into a small wind tunnel and videotape them with cameras recording 8,000 frames per second as the bees avoid being thrown off course, Humbert said.

"We introduce gust perturbations in the tunnel, and we try to extract out how the insects are changing their kinematics or their wing motions in response to the wind gust," he said.

The researchers are studying the bees' responses to the wind to develop robotic systems robust enough to tolerate gusts and quickly adapt to environmental disturbances on the battlefield. If the study is successful, it will give micro air vehicles solutions for mobility and autonomous flight control in complicated environments, Humbert said.

"We're basically trying to build small little robots that can go into buildings and gather information so that soldiers don't have to do that," Humbert said. "It's that last 100 yards where a lot of the casualties occur."

The university recently collected a $1.48 million grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research and also has a five-year $10 million grant from the Army.

The University of Washington is taking the lead on the Navy grant as part of the overall effort to develop "agile autonomous aerial vehicles that can operate in harsh environments, whether it's disaster areas or on the battlefield," Humbert said.

This university's portion of the research focuses on the study of organisms that will "characterize the principles that allow us to build the robots so they'll be able to do things like that," he added.

The researchers chose to study honey bees because they believe them to be relatively understudied in the biomechanics world, and they borrowed a partial bee colony from the university's entomology department, Humbert said.

Humbert said many of the studies are still in their infancy, as there is still a significant level of basic research that needs to be completed to create the autonomous robots. So far, he said, the researchers have discovered strategies for gust mitigation that can be employed on small flapping-wing robotic systems.

"We have worked on the aeromechanics that will enable small vehicle mobility," Humbert wrote. "Next we need to work on insect brains to uncover how they think so we can make them autonomous."

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