Source: OpenAI's DALL·E 2 with prompt "a hyperrealistic picture of a robot reading the news on a laptop at a coffee shop" Welcome to the 5th edition of Robo-Insight, a robotics news update! In this post, we are excited to share a range of new advancements in the field and highlight robots' progress in areas like human-robot interaction, agile movement, enhanced training methods, soft robotics, brain surgery, medical navigation, and ecological research. In the realm of human-robot interactions, researchers from around Europe have developed a new tool called HEUROBOX to assess interactions. HEUROBOX offers 84 basic and 228 advanced heuristics for evaluating various aspects of human-robot interaction, such as safety, ergonomics, functionality, and interfaces. It places a strong emphasis on human-centered design, addressing the vital connection between technology and human factors.

"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.

Something was wrong, but Thomas Schmickl couldn't put his finger on it. It was 2007, and the Austrian biologist was spending part of the year at East Tennessee State University. During his daily walks, he realized that insects seemed conspicuously absent. Schmickl, who now leads the Artificial Life Lab at the University of Graz in Austria, wasn't wrong. Insect populations are indeed declining or changing around the world.

With the aim of creating a robotic bee colony and knowing its basic fundamentals, the RoboBee project was launched in 2009 – to conduct early robotic fly experiments. It was preceded by the DelFly Project, which started in 2005.

These robots are the result of years and years of work in swarm robotics. It's not enough to build a little drone that can do bees' characteristic waggle dance; the researchers needed to create a team of tiny bots that have a hive-mind of their own. They also needed to be able to move, act, and learn as a unit rather than a jumbled mess of machinery. For example, engineers from the University of Graz used artificial intelligence to evolve the robots' behavior to be more like that of real-life bees as the drones themselves became more sophisticated. They also got two robotic swarms to interact with each other, flying around as cohesive units without individuals flying off on their own, or crashing into one another.

It's hard to exaggerate just how successful NASA's Mars Rover program has been. These little vehicles have crawled over different parts of the Martian landscape, sending back invaluable data. But these rovers have some limitations: They move incredibly slowly. In over 2,000 days on Mars, the rover Curiosity has traveled about 11 and a half miles. That's why NASA has approved exploratory funding for an entirely new type of explorer: a swarm of robotic bees controlled by AI.

America's agricultural sector faces an unprecedented crisis. Native honeybees, one of the most prolific pollinators in the animal kingdom, are dying off at an unprecedented rate from Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), threatening an ecosystem service worth about $15 billion. Supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the "RoboBees" project looks to minimize the loss of this critical resource with remarkable microbots that can mimic the pollinating role of a honeybee. But the project has a number of challenges to overcome before these robots can take to the skies. The RoboBee is a microrobot inspired by the biology of a honey bee.

A drone that can pollinate flowers may one day work side by side with bees to improve crop yields. About three-quarters of global crop species, from apples to almonds, rely on pollination by bees and other insects. But pesticides, land clearing and climate change have caused declines in many of these creatures, creating problems for farmers. Pollination is needed for reproduction in flowering plants. Male flower parts, or stamens, produce pollen that fertilises female parts, known as pistils, to make seeds.

Given their crucial life in our ecosystem by helping to pollinate flowers, bees are pretty darn important. But with a continuing radical population decline of bees around the world, it may be up to robots to step in and lend a helping hand. That is the mission of an unusual project taking place at Poland's Warsaw University of Technology. For the past four years, researchers there have been working to build robotic bees, called B-Droids, which they hope can carry out some of these tasks. More: Harvard scientists just figured out how to make their robotic bee'perch' on objects to save energy Through various iterations of the project, the robots have grown increasingly sophisticated -- from early wheel-based bots which used computers to find nearby flowers to the latest version, a quadcopter able to move from flower to flower taking pollen samples.

Binge watchers of Netflix's Black Mirror, released on Friday, understand that the only thing more terrifying than a swarm of bees, is a swarm of robotic bees harnessed to a nefarious end. The final episode, "Hated in the Nation," is showrunner Charlie Brooker's pièce de résistance, a truly terrifying imagination of the near future that comes a little too close to the truth for comfort. The super-long season finale takes aim at the real, destructive power of swarms, online and IRL. In this episode, (spoilers ahead) the villains are robotic bees, made to pollinate crops in the absence of real insects, but hacked, so that instead they go after the targets of online dragnets. Anyone marked with the #DeathTo hashtag might soon find themselves swarmed by tiny drones that fly up their nose and short-circuit their brain as their victim meets an extraordinarily painful end.