Engineers to use cyborg insects as biorobotic sensing machines

[Kontinuum]

A team of engineers from Washington University in St. Louis is looking to capitalize on the sense of smell in locusts to create new biorobotic sensing systems that could be used in homeland security applications.

Baranidharan Raman, associate professor of biomedical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, has received a three-year, $750,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to use the highly sensitive locust olfactory system as the basis to develop a bio-hybrid nose. Joining Raman in the research are engineering colleagues Srikanth Singamaneni, associate professor of materials science, and Shantanu Chakrabartty, professor of computer science & engineering.

Biological sensing systems are far more complex than their engineered counterparts, including the chemical sensing system responsible for our sense of smell, Raman said. Although the sense of smell is a primitive sense, it is conserved across many vertebrate and invertebrate species.

“It appears that biology converged onto a solution for the problem of non-invasive, or ‘standoff’ chemical sensing and has replicated the same design and computing principles everywhere,” Raman said. “Therefore, understanding the fundamental olfactory processing principle is necessary to engineer solutions inspired by biology.”

https://source.wustl.edu/2016/06/eng...sing-machines/

[Ryme]

Having just finished 1984, my paranoid mind is reeling at this