MIT researchers are one step closer to perfecting self-repairing robot bees

"Hated in the Nation," an episode of Netflix's dystopian sci-fi series "Black Mirror," predicted it: Thousands of robotic bees buzz from flower to flower, pollinating plants to make up for declining insect populations. And while the episode's robots eventually turn against their human inventors, killing over 387,000 people by ramming their artificial stingers into victims' heads, the MIT scientists working on perfecting today's aerial robots likely believe we don't need to worry about that. Despite the show's foreboding take on robotic bees, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are one step closer to perfecting the artificial aerial critters. In a paper published March 15, a group of researchers at MIT showed that using resilient muscle-like actuators and self-repairing technology can vastly improve the robustness of robotic bees. "Insects flying are incredibly difficult to understand," said Kevin Chen, an assistant professor at MIT, head of the institute's Soft and Micro Robotics Laboratory, and the senior author of the paper.