Miniature bee-drones made from pop-up-book-style fabrication

Gmoke sez, "Two grad students at Harvard have developed a method to print sheets of miniature drones, the Harvard Monolithic Bee or Mobee, that pop-up into their final form. So far they've got them to flap their titanium wings but they don't yet seem to be able to fly. Their construction technique can be used for very many other small devices too."

Pop-up Fabrication of the Harvard Monolithic Bee (Mobee)

(Thanks, Gmoke!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: aviation • Gadgets • military • submitterator • uav • video • youtube

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http://jere7my.livejournal.com jere7my

You need to fix your close-italics tag after “Thanks, Gmoke!” It’s got two slashes.
- http://www.fark.com/ Two Wolves
  
  GOD HATES TAGS
  - renke
    
    wwjd?
ackpht

Brilliant. This could allow economical, mass-produced micromechanical devices. It will be interesting to see the applications- cleaning out your arteries, helping you find your keys, or homing in on your individual pheromones to kill you.
http://twitter.com/randywalters Randy Walters

All right, I’ll say it…

I, for one, welcome our new monolithic bee overlords!
- dave moore
  
  Damnit!! Too slow again…
http://www.facebook.com/people/Preston-Barrows/13809633 Preston Barrows

awesome idea, would be cooler if they chose a machine that could actually work fully after manufacture; like basic little walkers. looks like they still need external power though so guess it dosent really matter either way.

disappointed without a final shot of at least a few dozen of them moving around at once…
christopherweitz

Enjoy the i Ching hexagram at 0:52
http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo

A shame they couldn’t work out the origami necessary to reproduce an authentic insect wing motion…

But as proof of concept, this is way cool. The vid was nice and informative, but it allowed me to think this jigger was three times bigger until it was nearly done… then I was like, wow.

I can’t wait to see a useful microrobot. Wonder how durable they’d be.
http://jarwadi.wordpress.com/ jarwadi

very brilliant :)
Sam Feinson

Miniature flying robots easily produced on a massive scale. This can only end well.
timquinn

Coming soon; monkeys fly from your ass !
http://mattdm.org/ Matthew Miller

Annnd, to add to the troll-irony here: this project is, of course, the one that Fox’s Sean Hannity put at the very top of his list of the “102 worst ways the government is spending your tax dollars”.
noah django

>mobee=monolithic bee
>monolith

“lith” means “stone.” every definition of “monolith” or “monolithic” except one contains the word “large.”

then, out of nowhere: “Electronics: (of a solid-state circuit) composed of active and passive components formed in a single chip.”

seriously, electronics people? wtf?
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Monolith means one (or single) stone. As opposed to build up of multiple stones. So, yeah, single chip = mono lith.
  - noah django
    
    i get that, but it negates hundreds of years of usage to mean “very large,” and also it is not made of stone. but hey, agree to disagree.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Those are megaliths.
      - noah django
        
        oh, my bad
Djawa Papandayan

whether the is automated.,? or use the remote.,? These are candidates for the scientists
http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios

Anytime I see something like this, the most recent cool “gee-whiz” thingie of the month, I can’t help but wonder….if this is what is publicly available, can you imagine what the Pentagon has still under wraps?
https://launchpad.net/~jer-gentoo jer

The song in the background is Bonobo’s “D Song”, by the way.
SavvyTennisBalls

I don’t think I’ve ever been this interested in parallelograms before.