Imagine your dystopian future...
A couple of overturned cars.
Crops can't grow.
Swarms of robots are the only signs of life.
Pretty textbook Apocalypse 101.
Except... What if it's not?
What if those robots could be part of the solution to prevent global catastrophe?
Robot bees.
It's almost impossible to overstate the role that bees - actual bees - play in our world today.
Nearly 75% of leading crops depend on animal pollination.
Without them, we really would be heading for disaster.
But bees have been in trouble for decades, mostly thanks to a toxic mix
of habitat loss, pesticides, climate change and disease.
The beekeepers across the United States have lost 45% of honeybee colonies
only between April 2020 and April 2021.
That's insane.
Honey bees are responsible for the one-third of the crop we actually eat, right?
So it's a big problem.
So in one sense, we're already in our dystopian future and we need to find solutions.
And for some that means robot bees, because in labs all over the world,
the race is on to create robot bees capable of pollinating plants
and revolutionising agriculture as we know it.
Even if it does still sound like a dystopian nightmare.
But how realistic is it to make them in the first place?
Because replicating what a bee does is a mammoth challenge.
To pollinate a flower, a bee has to locate the flower, identify where the pollen is,
navigate through all sorts of elements and obstacles,
and then land delicately on the flower itself.
That's a huge technological challenge, let alone cramming all that computing power
into something as small as a tiny robot.
But that's the task facing Chahat Singh at the University of Maryland.
We are at a stage where we are have the brain of a bee but at the size of a hummingbird.
So we can do pollination in the wild but for certain specific flowers.
But what we want is to do pollination for all the flowers in the world, right?
And generally sunflower is like one of the biggest flowers that we can find.
So if you want to pollinate the flowers which are very small,
we have to build something which is as small as a honeybee,
which is probably going to be like a 100th of the size.
Also taking on this robot bee challenge is Dr Kevin Chen at MIT.
If I look at the flowers, [it's] just probably about a couple of centimetres.
So I have to have very good precision for the robot to approach a flower,
gently land down the flower,
and there's very careful control so that it doesn't fall off.
So trying to land on a flower, approach a flower,
is a very challenging control problem.
But that's something we're actively solving right now.
But the latest robot bees are already capable of some impressive feats.
They can fly in all directions,
detect and avoid predators,
flip 360 degrees.
Well... Sometimes.
And they can already identify specific flowers to pollinate.
So we have an AI framework and it goes and searches and detects these flowers.
Once you know which flower you want to pollinate, it has a control policy which says
that I want to go down as close as possible
and on the bottom of the robot bee, there's a Velcro which extract these pollen grains.
The next goal for Chahat and his team is to downsize this robot hummingbird closer to the size of a bee.
But that's much easier said than done.
Everything is a trade-off between computer power and size.
And the major obstacle facing all robot bee pioneers is battery power on something so tiny.
These drones currently have a battery life of about 5 to 7 minutes because of the current state of batteries we have.
So one of the things that excites me, how do you come up with this cognitive design,
which is very similar to the mind of the bee, to actually get things working on that small scale?
Because you can't just take an artificial intelligence framework that works on a bigger drone
and just downsize it.
Near future, I would say I would definitely see the bees will be needed to work indoors
in which they will be tethered to a power supply.
Thinking about deploying a lot of them in the wild, having them pollinate,
really requires us to solve the energy or the power challenge first.
So you're really trying to either build more efficient bees
but also waiting for the next breakthrough in battery technology
that allows us to to have these artificial bees that can fly for much longer time.
But Chahat and his team do have an ingenious solution in the meantime.
They're working on an autonomous robot beehive,
where a massive robot mothership of a drone can fly to a tree, attach,
and then deploy its smaller robo-bee babies out to pollinate.
It's easier for the mother bee hive to detect these tree branches because it has the entire depth maps
that you see in most of the self-driving cars, right?
So it goes and autonomously attaches, or latches, on
and the mother bee commands these smaller bees,
'You find, you pollinate, and you come back to the bee.'
And this entire pipeline is autonomous.
So if you have a field of about 1,000 flowers, we would need about 8 to 10 small robot bees,
which can go around the field and pollinate 1,000 flowers in about 5 to 7 minutes.
But if the goal is essentially robotic pollination and the intricacies of both flight and power
are proving so difficult,
do we really need them to fly at all?
That's what researcher Yu Gu is looking at with his team at West Virginia University.
He's developing a ground-based robot that can pollinate flowers
as they go up and down the aisle of an indoor farm.
What we've done is more like
human pollinating, hand-pollinating cucumbers in a garden.
So if all goes as planned, with the extra computing power that something like this would bring,
there's way more that you might be able to do than just pollinate.
Yu Gu's robot would be able to monitor the plants at the same time
and send back reams more data, to make farming more efficient and deliver bigger yields.
The ability to pollinate is also the ability to support many other tasks.
So robots in some form are definitely part of the future of farming.
But let's go back to the robot bees.
Say all goes perfectly well.
We resolve the battery power problem,
robot bees are now capable of pollinating fields-worth of crops at a time,
but swarms of tiny robots that could fly anywhere, record information undetected, and be controlled remotely...?
What could possibly go wrong with that?
Apart from it literally being a Black Mirror episode.
If, say, I'm an evil scientist, and I want to do spying on people.
From a serious scientist perspective,
if I really want to do that evil thing, I probably wouldn't take a robo-bee as my first candidate to do those.
If I built a rotary vehicle, the aerodynamic efficiency is much higher than flapping wings.
Given the current engineering constraint, I'd probably do with a smaller, quieter rotor.
So basically there's better ways to spy on us.
Great.
Everything that the bee sees or anything that it sends is computed on the bee itself.
And it's not sending this information to any other source
and not relying on any other source to do this computation.
That stops the risk of the hacking of these tiny drones.
Marginally satisfying, although still relying on a fair bit of trust there.
But personal security is not the only concern that people have raised.
for a start ecological waste and damage could be another unintended consequence.
But it seems to me a bit of a flawed solution.
They're going to break down.
They're going to need maintaining,
there's the risk of them being hacked into.
Probably a much cheaper solution would be to look after real insects.
We are the reason they're declining and we could use fewer pesticides,
leave a little more habitat for them.
We often overlook the really obvious, simple solution and instead try to invent some really complicated technological fix.
There's certainly no replacement for actual bees.
It's estimated that nearly 600 billion-worth of global crops depend on pollinators, such as bees, to grow.
They're absolutely essential to global food production, and saving them from collapse has to be a priority.
But when it comes to robot bees, it's not exactly an either-or scenario,
as the researchers are keen to stress.
We have no intention of replacing bees. We are looking for a solution which could aid or help honeybees.
I think, you know, try to build robotic prototypes of smaller insects,
help us to understand the insect and can be beneficial for the biologists as well.
Evolution has like 3.8 billion years of research and development.
We should definitely learn from them.
There are also other pollination scenarios where bees don't even exist in the first place.
Like here.
We're also thinking about if you want to do an assisted agriculture experiment in space.
In those cases, of course, now we are using humans. The astronaut will be doing the pollination, etc.
But hopefully we can automate that process in the longer term.
But it's not only about pollination for these robot bees.
The researchers also dream of other exciting real world applications.
The scenario that I want to give is, for example, there is an earthquake and the building collapsed
and there are people who are trapped inside.
What micro-scale robot can be very useful [is] to search for how many people are trapped
and where are those who are trapped.
And beyond search and rescue, they can also help us avoid other doomsday scenarios
by going where humans struggle to reach,
like inspecting weak spots in bridges, or helping escape a nuclear meltdown.
These tiny little bee drones, they can go near the surface of these power plants
and they can look for the cracks,
and they can scan the entire thing to understand,
'Is there anything that needs to be repaired before we start this operation?'
So while swarms of robot bees might still be decades away,
if they happen at all,
it's clear that the technology is advancing rapidly.
And although it's tempting to pitch bees against robot bees in some hunger games style winner-takes-all,
that's not really the case.
Bees are the real deal and need protecting.
But robot bees may well have a part to play...