With the increasing frequency of explosions and terror attacks, law enforcement agencies and the military are looking for cheaper, yet efficient, bomb detectors. Even countries like Vietnam and South Korea have been investing in such bomb detectors to detect and remove active mine from minefields left over from the previous century.
A team of engineers and researchers from Washington University in St. Louis may have finally come up with a solution to tackle the notoriously difficult task of finding explosives. And what is their solution? Locusts! Cyborg locusts to be precise.
The research, funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and led by Baranidharan Raman, is banking on the olfactory system of locusts to develop a bio-robotic sensing system that homeland security applications can use.
The research aims to use cybernetic enhancements on locusts allowing them to be piloted remotely, use their antennae to detect explosives and relay information back to the handler, thereby increasing detection reliability and save lives at reduced costs.
Raman’s team found out that a odor triggers a dynamic neural activity a locust brain, allowing them to isolate a particular odor even in complex situations where there are overlapping odor.
“Biological sensing systems are far more complex than their engineered counterparts, including the chemical sensing system responsible for our sense of smell,” Raman said. “They can smell a new odor that comes into the environment within a few hundred milliseconds,” he told Popular Science.
Raman’s team does not plan on limiting the cyborg’s functionalities to detecting bombs. Singamaneni, a researcher in Raman’s team and an expert on multi-functional nano materials, is working on a plasmonic tattoo developed from a bio-compatible silk which will not only allow handlers to steer the locust but also collect samples of volatile organic compounds in their proximity. These chemicals can be then used to conduct a secondary analysis using more conventional methods.
“The canine olfactory system still remains the state-of-the-art sensing system for many engineering applications, including homeland security and medical diagnosis,” Raman said. “However, the difficulty and the time necessary to train and condition these animals, combined with lack of robust decoding procedures to extract the relevant chemical sending information from the biological systems, pose a significant challenge for wider application.
“We expect this work to develop and demonstrate a proof-of-concept, hybrid locust-based, chemical-sensing approach for explosive detection.”
