Tiny Drone: Artificial Robotic Pollinator, An Answer to Worldwide Pollination Crisis

Pollination is a natural process that allows plants to reproduce, which contains the genetic material of the plants that commonly require a pollinator, yet most of the pollinators are now endangered insect. Without this active pollinators, humanity is in trouble, so the Japanese researchers create succesful tiny drones that can pollinate an actual flower.

According to Engadget, the tiny drones were able to fly into the plants to grab and release a pollen of Japanese lilies. The remote-controlled tiny drones were equipped with a horsehair that is coated with a special liquid ion gel that sticky and moist as the Post-It notes. The tiny drone is the address of the world's pollination crisis, as it is a critical issue for the natural environment and to the human lives.

Creating an artificial pollinator, the researchers bought a $100 tiny drone that is commercially available. The sticky gel, as what stated earlier is used to capture a pollen when the tiny drone attaches the flower. Aside from constructing a robotic bee, the project focuses on the pollination process that practically a solution to the bee problem.

However, CNN indicated in a report that the pollination will only be achieved on a large flower, and the tiny drone is not an autonomous, but Eijiro Miyako, the project leader believes that some form of an artificial intelligence and GPS can be useful to develop autonomic machines in future. Miyako also noted that adding an AI, GPS, and cameras is considering a challenging as it has a small frame.

According to Christina Grozinger, the Director of the Center for Pollinator Research at Penn State University, the pollinators will be evolved on its specialized behavior to work on a different kind of flowers, which does not have on the artificial pollinator. It also has been difficult to the researchers to use the tiny drone to pollinate a lily since its sex organs are found to the largest plants. However, researchers are working on genetically modified cyborg dragonflies that have a potential to be used on bees as well.