3D Robotics

Harvard developing robot bees

From BotJunkie: "The National Science Foundation is giving Harvard a cool $10 million to develop a robot bee colony. That’s right, not just one, but an entire colony of robot bees. The bees will buzz around on flapping wings, use optical flow sensors for navigation and obstacle avoidance, sport cute little antennae as well as “pollination and docking appendages,” and use an as yet unspecified power source." We have got to get an optical flow community building here. All it takes is an old optical mouse to get started, as we discussed here!
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  • Looks like you can only get dx/dy data from the mouse camera/chip, because that's all they need to do.
    True optic flow gives a sense of speed/distance. You would need to redo the firmware on the chip and that's probably not possible, I don,t know? I do think it might be useful for yaw/pitch correction data. Don't think so for
    roll.(mices don't do any thing when you rotate them. It's a start though.
  • I would be very interested about joining the "optical flow community" in order to learn more about the technology.
  • Sounds cool, so long as they give due credit to Professor Keen Bean.
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