Step one was to carry out experiments to find out the results of oscillation on the newly designed robotic legs and leg joints. This concerned manually disturbing the leg after which releasing it, capturing the ensuing oscillations on high-speed video. This confirmed that the leg and joint primarily acted as an “underdamped spring-mass-damper mannequin,” with a little bit of “viscoelastic creep” for good measure. Subsequent, the staff carried out a sequence of free-fall experiments with small fiberglass crash-test dummy automobiles with mass and inertia much like RoboBee’s, capturing every free fall on high-speed video. This was adopted by checks of various takeoff and touchdown approaches.

The ultimate step was working experiments on consecutive takeoff and touchdown sequences utilizing RoboBee, with the little robotic taking off from one leaf, hovering, then transferring laterally earlier than hovering briefly and touchdown on one other leaf close by. The essential setup was the identical as prior experiments, excluding inserting a plant department within the motion-capture enviornment. RoboBee was in a position to safely land on the second leaf (or comparable uneven surfaces) over repeated trials with various parameters.

Going ahead, Wooden’s staff will search to additional enhance the mechanical damping upon touchdown, drawing classes from stingless bees and mosquitoes, in addition to scaling as much as bigger automobiles. This is able to require an investigation into extra advanced leg geometries, per the authors. And RoboBee nonetheless must be tethered to off-board management methods. The staff hopes someday to include onboard electronics with built-in sensors.

“The longer-term objective is full autonomy, however within the interim we now have been working by means of challenges for electrical and mechanical elements utilizing tethered units,” said Wood. “The security tethers have been, unsurprisingly, getting in the way in which of our experiments, and so protected touchdown is one essential step to take away these tethers.” This is able to make RoboBee extra viable for a variety of sensible purposes, together with environmental monitoring, catastrophe surveillance, or swarms of RoboBees engaged in synthetic pollination.

Science Robotics, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adq3059  (About DOIs).