NARRATOR: The most advanced robots of the future.
Could be...
Tiny.
Strength.
Speed.
Flight.
Insects come with their own super powers.
And one explorer wants to turn bugs into robots.
ROBERT: In fact this device also happens to be one of the fastest robots on Earth.
Twice as fast as Usain Bolt.
Right now, we're in the microrobotics lab, so we're about to see
some test stations where we test robotic insects.
I think where we get our design inspiration from is, a lot of the times,
nature, and there's good reasons for that.
One of the cool things about these types of robots is that
they can be used for exploration.
You can get into little nooks and crannies that other robots could not get into.
Devices like this, so you can kind of get a sense of the scale here.
We call these "robo bees," but it's kind of a misnomer.
The "bee" is supposed to invoke aspects of the social nature of bees.
In reality, the devices themselves are kind of more like flies.
Bees have four wings, flies have two.
Flies are arguably the most agile flyers on Earth, the agility that flies achieve,
that's what we're targeting.
The process of building a bee as you can imagine is quite complicated.
We use this tool.
It's a laser micromachining system to cut patterns into the materials to make a lot of
the small scale devices that we create.
The laser cuts patterns very fast and with very, very good precision.
So precision down to a fraction of the width of a human hair.
NARRATOR: Imagine: a robot built from tiny, metal hairs!
ROBERT: There still are a lot of components.
Some of it's done through manual assembly.
You're taking these two-dimensional components and then assembling them into
three dimensions.
Once you're done building the bee, then the interesting part happens,
because now you have to test it.
So that's right around the corner here, so come on, follow me.
All of the flight control tests happen here.
And we can think about this sort of as training wheels.
There's so many things that could go wrong with these tests.
And do go wrong with these tests, so a wing could break or a wing could fly off,
the actuators could crack and fail or even catch fire.
Ooh, no, not quite, not quite.
NARRATOR: Every crash is a chance to learn something new.
ROBERT: We understand how the wing motions that led to that failure, that crash.
So just so long as the thing doesn't blow up, then these failures are actually
mini successes.
So let's do one more thing, I'm just adjusting, I'm going to give it a little more
amplitude on the wing motions.
Ah, that's a beautiful flight, and-ok-see it's very quick!
So it only lasted for a few seconds.
In reality, we probably learned more along the way from the failures than,
than that simple maneuver.
Now, we can start to explore more aggressive maneuvers.
NARRATOR: And check out more animal superpowers.
ROBERT: There's many ways that we are enviable of the types of features that are seen
throughout the plant/ animal kingdom.
I think the most exciting thing about robotics is how close we are to exploding and
really positively impacting our lives.
Science fiction has been promising us a lot over the course of all of our lives.
Now, it's starting to come to fruition.
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.