Bumblebee Wings, ‘Biomechanical Strategies,’ and Insect-Inspired Microbots
Who knew, but apparently bees – while they appear steady in flight to your and my eyes – are actually bumping into things and each other all the time. That’s what researchers at UC Davis discovered when capturing bees with high-speed video to examine their flight patterns and behaviors. Further research details the existence of the protein Reslin located at the joints of wing segments, which allow bee wings to bend during collisions, which, ultimately, researchers want to apply to winged microbots (of course!).
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Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
