Tiny Robotic Bee Assembles Itself Like Pop-Up Book

Disregarding the engineering of the bee itself (which is equally amazing) the fabrication process is brilliant. 2 things come to mind when I watch this. A. I live in the future. B. There are people out there far more intelligent than I. Consider my mind blown.<p>I wonder if they are working on a method to power the bee for actual flight. Of course it has no control system either at this point. Off to read more. Thanks to the poster for the link.

Beautiful work. Although, I'd recommend just reading the press release[1]. It is more in depth and better explains the accuracy and reliability they can achieve.<p>I especially love seeing the bee in operation. Does anyone know by what mechanism the motion is generated?<p>Edit: My best guess is piezoelectric actuators[2].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news-events/press-releases/pop-up-flying-robots" rel="nofollow">http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news-events/press-releases/pop-u...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://micro.seas.harvard.edu/papers/Karpelson_ICRA09.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://micro.seas.harvard.edu/papers/Karpelson_ICRA09.pdf</a>

The Bee didn't assemble itself, nor did it look robotic to me yet as it was not even shown if it could fly or do other tasks. Very cool demo tho.

There's much leftover material that looks to be wasted. Is there any reason the block has to be this size? Can't the margins be smaller?

I'd love to see video of a swarm of these