Can honeybees really help scientist design better aircraft? Well maybe they don't actually help scientist, but they do inspire them.
Right now there is a research going on at Australia's Vision Centre, where honeybees are playing an amazing role, in inspiring scientist to design better aircraft. Bees are incredible pilots and are able to land safely anywhere with an astonishing precision, and this abiliy could really soon be implemented in the design of future aircraft. The scientists at the Australia's Vision Centre discovered that without knowing the speed of their flight or distance from their destination, honeybees where able to achive a perfect landing by beeing able to control their flight speed just in time for touchdown.
But how can honeybees control their flight speed just in time for a perfect landing if they don't know what their actual speed is nor the distance to their destination? Well, humans for example, use sterovision to help us distinguish distances. We are able to do this because our eyes are separeted enough so that we can capture different views of distant objects. However insects like the honeybee can't use stereovision as they have close-set eyes.Therefore, in order to land safely they use their eyes to sense the speed of the ground that is beneath them, so by keeping this image at a constant speed, they automatically slow down as they aproach their destination, and finally stopping at the right moment for a perfect landing.
But there is another thing about this, which is that bees will only ocasionally land on horizontal flat surfaces, so we kneed to continue studying them to see how they land on vertical surfaces, rough terrains, etc.
An experiment they did on how honeybees used its speed to make a perfect landing was to train a honeybee to make it land on rotating disks placed vertically, and then filmed with high speed cameras. These disks had spiral paterns and could be rotated at different speeds. When rotating the disk to make it appear that the spiral pattern was expanding, the honeybees slowed down, as they thought that they where aproaching their destination faster than they really where. But when the disk was rotated the opposite direction, some honeybees speeded up, even ending in crashing with the disk.
This discovery will be able to make cheaper and lighter robot aircraft as they only will need a video camera to land on surfaces with any otientation or roughness, ( as the actual robot aircraft technology uses radars, sonars or laser beams to calculate the distance from the surface, which are heavy and expensive) making aircraft able to land with the precision and grace of a honeybee.
This new is amazing. I actually read something similar about dragonflies; that humans were actually making hellicopters according to the physics of a dragonfly.
ReplyDeleteAnimals are made in a perfect way, and we are leraning a lot from just observing what is around us and how is that happening. Many of our achievements in technology and progress have been made thanks to nature and what does she offer to us.