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Harvard's Robotic Bees Generate High-Tech Buzz
coondoggie writes "Harvard researchers recently got a $10 million grant to create a colony of flying robotic bees, or RoboBees, to (among other things) spur innovation in ultra-low-power computing and electronic 'smart' sensors; and refine coordination algorithms to manage multiple, independent machines. The 5-year, National Science Foundation-funded RoboBee project could lead to a better understanding of how to mimic artificially the unique collective behavior and intelligence of a bee colony; foster novel methods for designing and building an electronic surrogate nervous system able to sense and adapt to changing environments; and advance work on the construction of small-scale flying mechanical devices, according to the Harvard RoboBee Web site."
They really should be trying to find something else: more reliable pollination. Yes real bees already do this but mass-produced robo-bees, besides being really cool, don't catch colony-dropping diseases.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I've been thinking similar things, and although I would be loathe to go back to the days of having to head down to the library and look through cards to find a book that answers a question I can get an answer for from google in seconds, the search trail I leave says a lot about me. Anyone who actually played around with the AOL search data realizes this.
My first thought when thinking about a network of tiny robots, was that someone in some government in this world will definitely turn this into a surveillance and data gathering tool. So while I love technology and the ease it brings to my life, I am also becoming more aware that my privacy is at much greater risk now than it was even as recently as the early/middle 90s. As technology becomes more pervasive, the ability to abuse it becomes more pervasive and I'm worried about that, in a non-Luddite fashion.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Exploding bees? That doesn't seem very useful given the small payload capacity. A more practical military application would be in targeted chemical/biological warfare. A sentry hive placed outside a military outpost could sniff intruders for a chemical friend-or-foe signature and, if it's absent, they could attack. This could even be used as a non-lethal weapon if the robotic insects injected a paralytic agent rather than a toxin.
The military applications are actually extremely interesting!