(http://spectrum.ieee.org/img/robobee-photo2-1443627654479.jpg)
For the last several years, Harvard has been developing a robot bee. They’ve done some impressive work: their sub-paper-clip-sized, 100-milligram flapping-wing micro aerial vehicle is fully controllable down to a stable autonomous hover.
Yesterday at IROS, Harvard researchers presented a paper describing how they managed to get their robotic bee to swim.
To fly (and particularly to hover) you need to do this very quickly, but to swim, it’s a much more relaxed motion. It’s fundamentally the same motion, though, and you can achieve it with the same basic hardware. In the case of RoboBee, to fly in air it flaps its wings at 120 Hz, while to swim in water it flaps its wings at just 9 Hz. Otherwise, three axis torque control is very similar, meaning that the robot can be steered around in the water, too.
(http://spectrum.ieee.org/img/robobee-dive-1443627350263.png)
Fonte:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/aerial-robots/harvard-robot-bee-is-now-also-a-submarine