Thursday 16 February 2012

Robotic Bee...

Engineers at Harvard University recently produced a technique that is inspired by the concept of pop-up books and origami which allows clones of tiny robots to be mass-produced in sheets. The reason why it's called the robotic bee as it represents the size of a bee, can fly and act exactly like the bee! Even though it's tiny and sounds simple, the process of making these miniature robots was prone to errors and hectic since the engineers manually did all the work. This is how it works: The 18 layers of different materials structure, which is built like a printed circuit board, flat shaped where in just one second it unfolds (like a pop-up book) by lifting the "assembly scaffold" using pins into a 3D model. To fold it back again all you need to is dip the model into a liquid metal solder to bond tiny brass together which locks the joints of the robot back in place. The size of the robot is small and so allows it to be copied numerous times easily! Here's the video to represent the process:


http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-02/16/pop-up-robot-production

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