Building a menagerie of mechanical creatures, from bees to termites

Rob Wood sometimes finds himself following a bee across neighbors' yards. "I guess it's just a fascination," says Wood, 33, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Harvard University.

As founder of the Harvard Microrobotics Lab, he is trying to identify the unique factors that make a variety of insects efficient. Then he's figuring out ways to replicate those biological advantages in tiny robots.

He and eight graduate students are working to build a menagerie of mechanical creatures, from bees to termites. They're using the locomotion of cockroaches and centipedes as models for gizmos that can navigate any terrain, perhaps to seek out victims in earthquake rubble. They're also studying the flap-and-glide of butterfly wings and the hovering of dragonflies to help them make tiny robots that can fly for miles. Conceivably these could be equipped with cameras or sensors and used for espionage.

Wood hopes his robo-insects will be as simple, sturdy, and powerful as the real critters. A horde of machines programmed with the same single-minded determination as real swarms might be useful in agriculture, construction, medicine, and other fields.

Read the full article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek