Electronic brain hacks are turning insects into robotic helpers. We're a long way from directly controlling human minds remotely, but recent years have seen a string of breakthroughs in hacking the minds of insects. Insect brains are probably the simplest interesting brains, as insects can perform a range of tasks (flying, smelling, carrying, etc.) with brains that have numbers of neurons orders of magnitude less than those in complex vertebrates. A fruit fly has around 100,00 neurons, compared to 85 billion in humans. So at the conjunction of neuroscience and robotics lie insects -- their tiny brains still too complex to model completely, but offering an easy way into modelling certain parts of the brain. It's how engineers from Sheffield and Sussex universities can claim they're preparing to upload the smell and sight parts of a bee's brain into a bee-like flying robot, enmeshed with human-created software to create a completely new "brain".
The hope is that the bee-bot could fly in areas that other robots can't fit, like a collapsed building. Swarm intelligence controls robotic planes. Deployment of Large Aerial Swarms. Flying robots swarm to the task of disaster rescue. Swiss researchers developing flying robots to aid rescue workers in disaster zones Swarms of robots would hover above rescuers establishing temporary Wi-Fi network System inspired by army ants which lay pheromone paths from nests to food sources Spin-off company senseFly sells lightweight flying robot for mapping and photography (CNN) -- Establishing emergency communication networks in disaster-hit areas can often take time, hampering rescue teams in their efforts to save lives. But a new system of autonomous flying robots being developed at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) could make establishing emergency wireless networks faster, more reliable and more affordable.
The Swarming Micro Air Vehicle Network (SMAVNET) research project at EPFL's Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS) was set up to study swarm intelligence -- the science of artificially mimicking the efficient collective behaviors of animal or insect colonies. Watch a demonstration here. Killer Swarms: The New Generation. I have an article in this months BBC Focus magazine - the world’s best science and technology monthly — about swarming robots. Previously I’ve looked at the potential for the deployment of large numbers of battlefield UAVs, but this goes into some detail about what flocking and swarming behavior actually mean and how they are being applied to robotics.
Nature is way ahead of us here. A flock of a thousand starlings can maneuver together with ease, changing flight plans from moment to moment, and without any central control. The methods they use are remarkably subtle and effective, and researchers are borrowing these from nature to enable multiple UAVs to operate in the same airspace without the risk of collision. The pioneering first flight of a flock of Onyx guided parachutes last year was a small milestone in unmanned flight.
Swarms are a level up from flocks. A unique feature of the KillerBees geometry is that it can be stacked. Pentagon Wants to Cover Its Drones With Insects’ Tiny Hairs | Danger Room. For years, the military has turned to the birds and the bees for inspiration, churning out mechanical hummingbirds and remote-controlled insect cyborgs. Now the Pentagon wants its mini-drones to have hairy wings and bug eyes, too.
It’ll help the tiny machines spy on — and creep out — any enemies, military researchers promise. MAVs or Micro Air Vehicles are tiny, hovering bots that have been deployed for battlefield reconnaissance. But they’re still as limited as they are small. MAVs can’t really navigate urban environments or maintain a stable hover when the wind suddenly shifts. ”Get them among buildings or give them something to do near the ground — and they’re helpless,” James Paduano, chief engineer for bio-inspired development projects at Aurora Flight Sciences Research & Development Center, told Danger Room.
Nature will be the engineers’ muse. “Figuring out how to make a MAV move around a cluttered environment is a really tough problem,” said Paduano. Photo: Wikipedia Commons.