Honeybee populations are declining. This poses a significant threat to agriculture, the economy, and pretty much life as we know it, due to bees’ crucial role as some of the natural world’s best pollinators. Could robots help?

That’s what researchers from West Virginia University (WVU) have been working to answer, via a new autonomous, bee-inspired robot that is designed to pollinate bramble plants — primarily blackberries and raspberries — in greenhouse environments. Its name: BrambleBee.

Unlike some of the nature-inspired, biomimetic robots we’ve written about i