US Navy Cyborg Grasshoppers
Grasshoppers are great chemical substance detectors. Better than our artificial devices. So what if we used them and make them into miniature bomb disposal technicians.
Image by Thor Deichmann from Pixabay
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Bomb Disposal Cyborg Insects
The job of a bomb disposal technician is dangerous for both humans are any larger animals that are commonly used to find explosives. But what will it be like for grasshoppers? Scientists from the Washington University in St. Louis that work for the US Navy recently improved grasshoppers making them into insect cyborgs that excel in searching for explosives.
Researchers used the fact that grasshoppers who have to search for sources of food have pretty powerful senses. The improved grasshoppers use their senses to find gases that are being released in tiny amounts from the materials that can be found in explosives such as ammonium nitrate. Ammonium nitrate is often used in both explosives that were made by terrorists and military explosives such as TNT or RDX.
American Grasshopper Robots
Individual cyborg grasshoppers are capable of detecting explosives but the best results are achieved by small swarms that try to find explosives together. The researchers were not really willing to answer a lot of questions about their project. But their publications indicate that they implanted miniature electrodes and used them to analyze the activities of their nervous system.
The scientists decided to use the American grasshopper (Schistocerca Americana) because they are quite resilient bugs and are capable of carrying even heavy loads. The true challenge was to find a way to read the minds of the grasshoppers without needed to do any surgery as that would make it hard for the grasshoppers to fly into action.
But to have the insect cyborgs actually be useful in real situations you need them to be remote control insect cyborgs. For the time being, they are putting them into small vehicles that can be remote controlled. But they are already finishing a new technology in the form of implants made from nano-tattoos from a silk material that will allow them to control the grasshoppers remotely without the need for the vehicles.
Grasshoppers are quite the powerful sensors. Their antennas have about 50 thousand olfactory neurons and that makes grasshoppers excellent at detecting a wide range of substances. In fact, they are better than any artificial sensors we have created until this point. But according to their creators, one problem is the fact that you need to keep the grasshoppers alive. In the future, they want to create hybrid systems that will only include the olfactory apparatus of grasshopper connected to artificial systems.
Four years ago the U.S. Office of Naval Research invested 750 thousand dollars into the project. Nobody knew whether this would even work. But now it seems that the cyborg grasshoppers could appear in action.
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