Populations of major pollinators—bees, butterflies, wasps, beetles and others—are diminishing drastically worldwide. And, this rapid decline of pollinators is alarming and poses a great threat to biodiversity and food security. These concerns may be allayed soon. Researchers at Tampere University have developed a Dandelion seed-inspired flying robot that can potentially stand in for some of these pollinators.
The Flying Aero-robots based on the Light Responsive Materials Assembly, FAIRY robot, is a tiny lightweight robot that relies on wind to float in the air. Interestingly, the robot can be controlled with a light source such as a laser beam or an LED. This means that the researchers could apply light to the robot to change its shape, allowing it to adapt to the wind’s direction. This light beam can also be used to control take-off and landing. The study has been published in the journal Advanced Science.
Populations of major pollinators—bees, butterflies, wasps, beetles and others—are diminishing drastically worldwide. And, this rapid decline of pollinators is alarming and poses a great threat to biodiversity and food security. These concerns may be allayed soon. Researchers at Tampere University have developed a Dandelion seed-inspired flying robot that can potentially stand in for some of these pollinators.
The Flying Aero-robots based on the Light Responsive Materials Assembly, FAIRY robot, is a tiny lightweight robot that relies on wind to float in the air. Interestingly, the robot can be controlled with a light source such as a laser beam or an LED. This means that the researchers could apply light to the robot to change its shape, allowing it to adapt to the wind’s direction. This light beam can also be used to control take-off and landing. The study has been published in the journal Advanced Science.
The inability of scientists to make small robots fly despite synthesizing smart materials as good as animal muscles piqued the curiosity of Hao Zeng, the lead author of the research paper.
“Looking at the small insects, butterflies and hovering birds, they have well-defined trajectories for the wing movement. So, flying by wing flapping should be a simple skill to learn. Let’s forget about the agility and sophistication in controlling the flight motion, but consider the simplest step in natural flying species – flapping the wing to take off, can we reproduce them in inanimate material? To achieve this will be a big progress in the research of micro robots and smart materials, and it will be the next step of our research,” said Zeng to indianexpress.com over email.
The polymer assembly robot inspired by dandelion seeds is equipped with a soft actuator made of light-responsive liquid crystalline elastomer. Because of this, the researchers could induce the bristles of the actuator to open or close by exciting it with visible light. According to Zeng, the proof-of-concept built by the team shows that it is an important step towards the realistic application of robots that can act as pollinators.
Last year, engineers from Northwestern University published a research article in the journal Science Robotics about a similar invention. They built various tiny robots that could be controlled using lasers. At the time, the researchers told indianexpress.com that they envisioned controlling a swarm of such robots to carry out various tasks. So the natural question was, can a swarm of FAIRY robots be controlled to pollinate plants in an area?
However, researchers at Tampere University have a radically different approach. “Control, coordination, precision in actuation, and manipulation over long distance are words from the field of robotics. In our research, we try to think in a different way. In a biomimicry sense, we try to build the material-based robot smart enough to decide by itself what to do,” said Zeng.
The researchers envisage that the robot can be used to pollinate plants. (Image credit: Tampere University)
“We can see many examples in nature,when the light illuminating condition, temperature and humidity condition meet, the flowers bloom, and the seeds start to disperse. This is the capability we try to improve in our materials. In this paper, we made a robot to take off upon light excitation inside a wind flow. Now, we have humidity-responsive material in the lab, and are able to make a robot to take off when there is high humidity in the environment,” added Zeng.
Zeng explained that the researchers are working on the robot to let it self-adapt to environmental changes and work automatically. Essentially, they could be configured in such a way that their design makes them activate automatically and pollinate plants depending on ideal environmental conditions.
But, that is still far away and researchers have many short-term hurdles to overcome. For example, all the tests were conducted in laboratory conditions, and the robot’s materials are not sensitive enough to operate in sunlight. The robot is quite fragile and during strong winds it will be blown away, just like the dandelion seeds – its source of inspiration.
Apart from fixing these issues, the researchers are also working on scaling up the structure so that it can carry micro-electronic devices like GPS and sensors.
Source: Indian Express
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