Engineers hope to upload bees' brains into robots

Engineers hope to upload bees' brains into robots

Researchers
in the U.K. hope to create "bionic bees" by scanning honey bees' brains
and uploading them into autonomous flying robots. And they're not even
doing it for a sci-fi film.



by Bailey Johnson October 3, 2012 12:16 PM PDT


Meet your future robot overlord?


(Credit:
University of Sheffield
)


Sometimes real science sounds more like science fiction. Just the
phrase "bionic bees" sounds like something out of an old paperback.

But that's the goal of a new project from two U.K. universities, the
University of Sheffield and the University of Sussex. Engineers from the
schools are planning to scan the brains of bees and upload the data
into flying robots with the hope that the machines will fly and act like
the real thing.

The goal of the project is to create the first robots able to act on
instinct. Researchers hope to implant a honey bee's sense of smell and
sight into the flying machines, allowing the robots to act as
autonomously as an insect rather than relying on preprogrammed
instructions.


Possible applications for the bionic bee include search and rescue
missions at sites such as collapsed mines, detecting chemical or gas
leaks, and even pollinating plants just like a real bee.


"The development of an artificial brain is one of the greatest
challenges in artificial intelligence. So far, researchers have
typically studied brains such as those of rats, monkeys, and humans, but
actually 'simpler' organism such as social insects have surprisingly
advanced cognitive abilities," James Marshall, head of the $1.61 million
study, said in a statement.

Researchers anticipate that developing a model for scanning and
uploading an animal's brain will offer insight into how a brain's
cognitive systems work, potentially offering advances in understanding
animal and human cognition.

"Not only will this pave the way for many future advances in
autonomous flying robots," wrote Thomas Nowotny, the leader of the
Sussex team, "but we also believe the computer modeling techniques we
will be using will be widely useful to other brain modeling and
computational neuroscience projects."

The project -- which researchers have dubbed "Green Brain"
-- is funded by the U.K.'s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research
Council with technical help from IBM and hardware donated by Nvidia.
Scientists hope to have a bionic bee up and buzzing by 2015.



http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57525455-1/engineers-hope-to-upload-bees-brains-into-robots/