Brilliantly bonkers, but better bee backpacks brings bountiful... business ?
Originally shared by Eli Fennell
Bumblebees with Bugged Backbacks Beat Bug Bots with Batteries
Researchers at the University of Washington have equipped Bumblebees with sensor backpacks, in an alternative approach to building insect-sized drones for the same purposes.
The ability to equip thousands of small drones, or conversely to equip small living creatures, with small sensors is potentially invaluable for applications such as large scale agriculture, by efficiently gathering thousands upon thousands of individual data points such as location, temperature, and humidity.
Insect sized drones currently suffer from extremely limited battery life, operating for a half hour or less at a time. Flying insects like Bees are much more power efficient. Previous research, however, has utilized GPS chips attached to the insects to gather location data, which in itself is inefficient, exhausting their portable batteries very quickly.
This new approach removes the GPS chips from the equation by instead calculating location data by measuring Radio Frequency signals from wireless Access Points near the hive, which both download and transmit data from the sensor backpacks on the bees, as well as wirelessly charging their batteries, whenever they return within range of the Access Point.
While true insect-sized mechanical drones may some day become a reality, in the meantime it seems likely that approaches such as this, which utilize living insects and other insect-sized animals in combination with other technologies, are likely to be more successful in the near term.
Living things are typically far more energy efficient than any current human technologies, thereby allowing researchers to focus on designing efficient sensor tech, without worrying about the energy costs of physical locomotion.
#BlindMeWithScience #Bionics #Drones
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/12/boffins_build_bugged_bugs/
Bollocks!
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