The Drone AND THE Honey bee: As bee colonies around the world collapse, engineers are working to develop flying robots that might one day pollinate flowers. But can swarms of machines actually replace insects?

DRONE aircraft; ROBOTS; TECHNISCHE Universiteit Delft; ARTIFICIAL neural networks; NATIONAL Science Foundation (U.S.)

The article focuses on the DelFly, an insect-like drone robot which was developed by 11 students at Delft University of Technology as a part of capstone project in 2005 that behaves like a mechanical pollinator. Topics discussed include the development of a robotic hive for flying robots, and funds donated by biologists, computer scientists, and materials experts from the U.S. National Science Foundation for developing robotic hive and deep neural network (DNN) chip for the RoboBee.