Scientists from Singapore and the United States are working to control the flight of the giant flower beetle wirelessly. They employ a small backpack to control flight by stimulating the insect's muscles. According to the researchers, the aim of the project is to search for survivors after a natural disaster, like that of the Defense Advanced Research Agency's (DARPA's) Robotics Challenge. But of course, the military will find many other uses for these remote-controlled insects.

"The notion of using swarms of small insects in disaster relief situations [for example, insects equipped with a simple temperature sensors crawling and flying through rubble] has always been very compelling to me," said head of the U.S. side of the project, Michel Maharbiz, an associate professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and the study's principal investigator.

In fact, the U.S. military has been trying to control animals remotely to carry microphones for surveillance since World War II. But it wasn't until the 20th century that electronics and control mechanisms became sophisticated enough to make the scheme work. Today, real progress is being made towards controlling flying insects in particular, because of the tiny microprocessors, sensors and actuators that can be built into millimetre-sized gram-weight wireless "backpacks."

Of course, the researchers today justify such control of animals to save human lives, but the funding is still coming from the government. In this case, the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the U.S., the Nanyang Assistant Professorship in Singapore and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) headed up by the chief of the Singapore Defense Force.

The key to putting the giant flower beetle on remote control was the identification of the muscle which controls its finely graded turns in flight. That was done by first making a tiny backpack that monitored its natural flight patterns and the natural muscular stimulation that initiated the turns. In the process, the team corrected the biology books, which since the 1800s asserted that that muscle was only used to control the folding up of the wings after landing. However, by monitoring the muscles in flight they were able to determine that the secondary function of the muscles was to finely control turns in flight.

Now the team is out to use the same approach on other animals—first monitor them to see which muscles do what, then design a backpack that controls the functions they desire to control.

Previous generations of biologists had a more difficult time understanding how each muscle worked in an animal—especially flying ones—because the wireless technology was not there to support free flight. Instead, they were tethered, which made it nearly impossible to separate out the natural muscular movements from those made to compensate for the tether—in this case, what biologists call the coleopteran third axillary sclerite (3Ax) muscle in the Mecynorrhina torquata species (giant flower beetle).

The beetles weigh about 8g, whereas the wireless backpack complete with battery weighted just 1.5g. In more detail, the device had six electrodes connected to the optical lobes and flight muscles of the beetle all powered by a 3.9V lithium battery. Signals were transmitted to the backpack only at about 1kHz.

Cyborg insect research led by engineers at UC Berkeley and Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU) is enabling new revelations about controlling finely graded turns with wireless radios that recording neuromuscular data as the bugs flew untethered, then used that information to improve the precision of the beetles' remote-controlled turns

By: DocMemory
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