Robert J. Wood’s RoboBee X-Wing flies solo

RoboBee X-Wing (Eliza Grinnell/Harvard Microrobotics Lab) and Rob Wood

An untethered bee robot co-created by EE alumnus Robert J. Wood (PhD ’04, advisor: Ron Fearing) graces the cover the of the June 2019 issue of Nature magazine and is the subject of a Wired article titled “What Could Possibly Be Cooler Than RoboBee? RoboBee X-Wing.”  Wood, now a professor of engineering and applied sciences at Harvard, is one of the creators of the RoboBee X-Wing, an aerial vehicle the size of an insect that is capable of untethered flight.  It has four wings driven by two piezoelectric actuators and carries a 60-mg photovoltaic array and a 91-mg signal generator, giving it a thrust efficiency matching that of similarly sized insects.