Journal 7, October 11

Article: Harvard's Robotic Bees Generate High-Tech Buzz

At Harvard University an ambitious project has been started to create a tiny colonisable robotic bee. The RoboBee Project as they are calling it has been granted 10 Million dollars from the National Science Foundation toward their goals.

The project seems to have similar goals as the DelFly only on a far smaller scale. The small size would make them less noticeable. Their low visual profile could make them useful in covert military operations.

I imagine that for systems such as this to see any widespread use other than as children's toys the amount of time that can be spent in the air must be vastly improved. For instance the Delfly 2 can only hover for 8 minutes or 15 minutes horizontal flight. A recent leap in battery technology, which I bet has left many chemical engineers slapping their heads that they hadn't thought of it sooner, may allow for this its called lithium-air battery technology and the air around the battery is used as part of the cathode for theoretical gain of up to 10x in capacity over standard high capacity lithium-ion batteries. The major gain for small flying robots in such batteries comes from the fact that the cathode is air and doesn't weight down the robot.

There could be some dangerous implications if the technology got into the wrong hands such as remote spreading of infectious disease without notice. Of course that doesn't mean we should live in fear. Quite the contrary life and progress must go on. I mean even today a flyby of a model aircraft spreading its payload over a small area might not even be noticed at all.

Other than terrorism I think the obvious danger to such small remote devices is privacy. Imagine if such devices were deployed everywhere similar to how CCTV is in Britain. I think security cameras are fine things to have in stores. They are often used by police to help track down thieves but when the if camera starts following you around you could hardly be called paranoid if it makes you feel uneasy.

On the other hand if these RoboBees were unleashed into a field and equipped with cameras and lasers I think it would make for a great online flying laser tag experience. It would probably have to be hosted in local areas however due to latency issues over the Internet. I think it would probably be more feasible than OnLive. Onlive would have ridiculous hardware costs for rendering and streaming game content requiring local area hosting relative to players to keep the enormous amounts of data off the Internet backbones and maintain low latencies.

While I don't think the will be of much practical use for people other than surveillance I think they would probably sell like hot cakes for a couple years, assuming they cost under $100, and raise the technological bar set in peoples minds yet again.

So have fun making Robobees Harvard but please don't give them stingers!