[HN Gopher] MIT Unveils New Robot Insect, Paving the Way Toward ...
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       MIT Unveils New Robot Insect, Paving the Way Toward Rise of Robotic
       Pollinators
        
       Author : bookofjoe
       Score  : 40 points
       Date   : 2025-01-21 18:12 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (thedebrief.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (thedebrief.org)
        
       | ge96 wrote:
       | Would be curious how the "solenoid" works, does it pull in/out
       | towards the center line and the wings flap somehow like on a
       | hinge?
        
       | josefritzishere wrote:
       | dystopian... is there something wrong with actual insects keeping
       | their day jobs?
        
         | novosel wrote:
         | "The envisioned indoor farm would grow fruits and vegetables
         | inside a multilevel warehouse, maximizing yield per acre while
         | minimizing environmental impacts through a controlled, closed-
         | loop system."
        
         | sdwr wrote:
         | Insects don't want to work anymore! Lazy bastards keep
         | complaining about pollution and climate change and pesticides
        
         | rixthefox wrote:
         | Yeah, all our pollution and climate change is disrupting
         | ecosystems.
         | 
         | Our only way to ensure survival on and off the planet is to
         | mimic their actions (in this case pollination) to ensure that
         | if we do manage to push more and more species to extinction we
         | have options for being able to continue after they are gone.
        
         | doctoboggan wrote:
         | If you ever hear new robot + useful task always assume it's a
         | cover story for weapons delivery. Why do you think so many new
         | robots are advertised as great for "search and rescue after a
         | disaster"? Its one config file away from search and kill in a
         | war zone.
        
           | bilbo0s wrote:
           | Insect-bots are the penultimate search and kill. Also the
           | penultimate mass kill. The ultimate would have to be nanobots
           | if we can ever get to reliable swarms of them.
           | 
           | But it's not the weapons that interest me so much as what
           | people come up with as countermeasures. It'll be fascinating
           | to watch the next few years.
        
             | polishdude20 wrote:
             | Imma invest in fly swatters
        
         | mainecoder wrote:
         | This robotic pollinator can barely even fly for 45 sec, they
         | cannot scale it sufficiently they can just say minidrone but to
         | even think about using it as an actual pollinator and the
         | economics making sense is at the present far far away.
        
         | mystified5016 wrote:
         | Extinction, generally.
         | 
         | I'd rather have combat insects we can turn into pollinators
         | once the ecosystem collapses than have nothing at all.
        
           | airstrike wrote:
           | One step closer to the Matrix
        
           | thesuitonym wrote:
           | I think I'd rather just have nothing at all.
        
             | nomel wrote:
             | If you travel and see how people live in very large cities,
             | especially in Asian countries, you'll find that interacting
             | with any sort of nature is _already_ optional for many
             | people. These people won 't notice. The indiscriminate
             | pesticides will continue to flow, killing the natural
             | bee/insect populations, with a slow transition to
             | artificial pollination being an efficiency quirk of modern
             | farming.
        
         | nilamo wrote:
         | Maybe beekeeping is hard on Mars, so we need a new way to
         | polinate the food supply?
        
         | tap-snap-or-nap wrote:
         | Insects are now free to do art...with subscription ai pushed by
         | the big giant tech.
        
       | airstrike wrote:
       | Obligatory Slaughterbots link:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
        
       | slibhb wrote:
       | Right out of Ernst Junger's best book:
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bees (1957)
        
       | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
       | Wasn't there a sci-fi anthology series (maybe _Black Mirror_?)
       | that had an episode, where a high-tech wizard used robot bees as
       | weapons (particularly nasty ones)?
        
         | senkora wrote:
         | Yep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation
        
       | mhb wrote:
       | So it has the same power deal-breaker as all of these things.
        
       | pilingual wrote:
       | NHK did a story a couple months ago on a company in Japan called
       | HarvestX that focused on pollinating strawberries using an arm
       | not a drone.
       | 
       | What they learned in their research was the more evenly and
       | completely the pollen was spread, the more idyllic in shape the
       | strawberry.
        
       | aspenmayer wrote:
       | Found this video on the MIT Robotics YouTube page of some of the
       | robots Kevin Chen was working on from a year ago, but I couldn't
       | find any videos of the new on on YouTube.
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmrDK_w0Yog
       | 
       | The paper itself links to some videos but I haven't looked at
       | those yet.
        
       | TechTechTech wrote:
       | Also see the video of Veritasium of 5 hours ago where his team
       | visits this lab and the technology is explained in more depth.
       | 
       | https://youtu.be/H6q6pYZ9Fho
        
       | pr337h4m wrote:
       | Huh, a hunter-seeker
        
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       (page generated 2025-01-21 23:02 UTC)