The infestation of a new type of bug could greatly help farmers manage crops, control weeds, and better grow fruits and vegetables.

Robotic centipedes and bees, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), are helping redefine what is possible in agriculture through airborne drones and crawling devices that patrol vast swaths of land, collecting data and taking actions that would otherwise require hundreds of humans and countless hours.

Ground Control Robotics (GCR) has developed centipede-like robots for management of perennial crops, where the plant — say, wine grapes — stick around and are harvested yearly. Wine grapes can grow on steep, rocky slopes, making them hard to reach. GCR is working with a vineyard owner and blueberry farmer in Georgia on pilot projects to refine the mobility and sensing capabilities of its robots within the next few months in crop management and weed abatement.

A decentralized swarm of the robots would roam fields all day, making and reporting observations. Eventually, they will be designed to tear out weeds with robotic jaws or even lasers. The investment would be probably less than $1,000 per bot because leg modules are relatively inexpensive and most of the intelligence is mechanical rather than sense-based or compute-based.

Daniel Goldman, a physics professor at Georgia Tech and CEO of GCR, says the bot, which is made up of a head with some sensors and cable-connected segments with motors, isn’t bioinspired as much as “robophysical” models of living systems.

“I like the idea of carefully studying the animals,” Goldman says. “We use the models to test biological principles, discover new phenomena with them, and then bring those insights into hardened robots which can go outside of the lab.”

Meanwhile, scientists at MIT are crafting robotic insects that one day may swarm from mechanical hives and perform pollination at a quicker rate so that fruits and vegetables grow faster without compromising the environment.

The task of robotic insects is not new, but previous generations of the bug-sized bots were hampered by a lack of velocity, endurance and aerial ability compared to bees and other insects.

The new bots, which weigh less than a paperclip, can hover for about 1,000 seconds (nearly 17 minutes) — more than 100 times longer than previously achievable. They also can fly significantly faster than similar bots while completing acrobatic maneuvers like double aerial flips, according to MIT.

This should help farmers significantly ramp up crop yield through a more efficient method of something called artificial pollination, especially within multilevel warehouses.

“With the improved lifespan and precision of this robot, we are getting closer to some very exciting applications, like assisted pollination,” says Kevin Chen, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

Driving the robot’s wings are artificial muscles — tiny, soft actuators made from layers of elastomer, sandwiched between two thin carbon nanotube electrodes and rolled into a squishy cylinder. The actuators rapidly compress and elongate, generating mechanical force that flaps the wings. Another new design is a long wing hinge that reduces torsional stress experienced during flapping-wing motion.