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. And it makes sense to use nature’s own smell modules instead of developing new ones — their combination of efficiency in size and operation is so far unmatched by anything synthetic. A bee-bot could smell out explosives in a warzone, or drugs in shipping containers, or any of many other myriad uses, and actually go investigate. They can even be used as little spies. Who would notice a fly sitting on the wall of a meeting room?

A lot of research in the area of bug brains is being funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon agency which seeks out new technologies for military use. It’s not hard to imagine a future where drones are grown on farms, with extra controls implanted at the larval stage — a process developed by bionic researchers at North Carolina State University.