Postcard RoboBee

$2.00 at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

The RoboBee is the world’s first insect-scale flying robot. Weighing 80 milligrams (approximately the weight of a honeybee) with a wingspan of little more than 1 inch (3 cm), the RoboBee was designed by researchers at Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The team wanted to create a robotic bee colony that replicated the unique interactions of thousands of bees, a response to the alarming collapse of bee colonies worldwide in recent years. Facing the challenge of producing minuscule…