Harvard has just announced the receipt of a grant that will allow them to develop and build robots based off of bees. From the press release:

A multidisciplinary team of computer scientists, engineers, and biologists at Harvard received a $10 million National Science Foundation (NSF) Expeditions in Computing grant to fund the development of small-scale mobile robotic devices. Inspired by the biology of a bee and the insect’s hive behavior, the researchers aim to push advances in miniature robotics and the design of compact high-energy power sources; spur innovations in ultra-low-power computing and electronic “smart” sensors; and refine coordination algorithms to manage multiple, independent machines.

So what this team hopes to accomplish here is the creation of tiny robots that not only share data but work together like bees in a hive. So in this way, a whole group of small robots could all communicate and work together to complete a larger task.

I can only imagine this is the first step of many of creating nanobots that can do the same thing – not only communicate, but work together as a hive to accomplish something that an individual nanobot could not do alone.

Another development that the team hopes comes out of this is a “smart sensor” that allows the robots to detect each other, objects, their targets and more. It would send this signal back to its “brain” which would then adjust its flight pattern and speed based on this data.

So, for example, the bee could go out on a mission to discover some kind of resource, relate this to the other bees and then fly back to a docking bay which would then allow us to pull the data from it and see what it, and others in the collective, learned.

For more information be sure to read their news release.