RoboBee powered by soft artificial muscles can crash into walls without being damaged

A group of scientists have created a resilient RoboBee, that can survive crashing into walls and other robots without being damaged. The invention marks the first microrobot powered by soft artificial muscles that has achieved a controlled flight. Researchers in the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) developed a resilient artificial bee powered by soft actuators. Often these soft components have been dismissed as too difficult to control as their flexibility can lead to the system buckling at weak points if pushed to activate movements at speed. Yufeng Chen, a former graduate student and postdoctoral fellow at SEAS and first author of the paper, said: 'There has been a big push in the field of microrobotics to make mobile robots out of soft actuators because they are so resilient.'