Now It All Makes Sense

Summertime on campus is really different – because obviously there are fewer students, that is the time for construction projects and summer camps and conferences and so on.  One day during the summer, I was walking to Starbucks at the ZSR Library and I swore I had seen some sort of giant, freakish bug hovering over the library.  I tried to take a picture of it and the sunlight was such that I could not get a clear view.   It was a lot bigger than an insect – more like the size of a hawk.  Gone before I could figure out what it was.

I had sort of filed that odd instance under the #strangethingsyouseeoncampus hashtag and didn’t give it another thought.  Until yesterday, when I saw on the WF homepage that the Physics department had created this crazy buglike thing.

“Soaring over a dense canopy of trees, a flying, insect-like robot developed by Wake Forest researchers will give an unprecedented look at Peru’s tropical cloud forest, one of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems.”  You can take a look at the full story here.   There is some really cool research being done with using a drone to work with the rainforest canopy.

And this is the giant buglike drone.