Flight of the RoboBee

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

The initial project was supported by an NSF 2009 Expeditions in Computing grant, which provided $10 million over five years to the interdisciplinary, multi-investigator research teams to fund transformative computing and information technology research.

In 2012, Wood received the Alan T. Waterman Award, which recognizes one outstanding young science or engineering researcher each year.

And in 2015, Wood and his collaborators received an NSF grant to work with Intel Corporation and develop aspects of the brain-inspired computing chips their team had developed for a range of other small, autonomous systems. The award is one of a handful made as part of the InTrans program, which allows researchers to mature and deploy successful research results in industries and to transition innovations into new technologies.

Meanwhile, research on the RoboBee continues. The team is currently working to make the perching mechanism omnidirectional, enabling the robot to land anywhere, and developing onboard power sources that could allow RoboBees to fly untethered.

Wood estimates it will take another five to 10 years before the RoboBee might be ready for use in the real world.

This type of research requires a high level of sustained, long-term investment -- something at which NSF excels and which helped spur technologies like the Internet, Wi-Fi and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

"The RoboBees project is a great example of the value of sustained support for basic research," Wood added. "Long-term investment in high-impact research pays tremendous dividends in terms of the technology fallout. We have experienced this time and time again with this project. NSF support is essential for projects like these and in general to keep the U.S. at the forefront of technology innovation."

• < Previous Page