Rob Wood Talk

On Thursday, I went to a talk by Rob Wood about Robobees, flying machines, about the size of a bee that can fly in the flight pattern of flies. So far, they have been able to make the Robobees get off the ground and land sideways on a surface. I thought that the most interesting part of the lecture was how they made the Robobees. At first, people would hand build the bees by using tweezers to put all the pieces on the body. This process was very time intensive and took a lot of skill to complete. Since they wanted to be doing a lot of experiments with the bees, the lab wanted a faster way to make the bees so they could make a lot of them in a short period of time. So, they took inspiration from pop up books and found a way to fold the bees into place. The process starts by machining different layers of material in a specific pattern.Then they stack the layers together and laminate them. After that they will release the device and pop the bee out of the flat, layered, piece into the Robobee. This process allows a 2 dimensional object to be made into a 3 dimensional object. This process can be used with any material, is fast to make, can make any structure, and allows different sensors to be put in while the bee is still flat. The downside to this process is that it takes a long time and is very difficult to design.