Vision serves as an essential sensory input for insects but consumes substantial energy resources. The cost to support sensitive photoreceptors has led many insects to develop high visual acuity in only small retinal regions and evolve to move their visual systems independent of their bodies through head motion. By understanding the trade-offs made by insect vision systems in nature, we can design better vision systems for insect-scale robotics in a way that balances energy, computation, and mass. Here, we report a fully wireless, power-autonomous, mechanically steerable vision system that imitates head motion in a form factor small enough to mount on the back of a live beetle or a similarly sized terrestrial robot. Our electronics and actuator weigh 248 milligrams and can steer the camera over 60° based on commands from a smartphone. The camera streams "first person" 160 pixels-by-120 pixels monochrome video at 1 to 5 frames per second (fps) to a Bluetooth radio from up to 120 meters away. We mounted this vision system on two species of freely walking live beetles, demonstrating that triggering image capture using an onboard accelerometer achieves operational times of up to 6 hours with a 10-milliamp hour battery. We also built a small, terrestrial robot (1.6 centimeters by 2 centimeters) that can move at up to 3.5 centimeters per second, support vision, and operate for 63 to 260 minutes. Our results demonstrate that steerable vision can enable object tracking and wide-angle views for 26 to 84 times lower energy than moving the whole robot.

Wireless steerable vision for live insects and insect-scale robots

It is hard to imagine with the progress in robotics that current approaches are lacking somewhere, yet they will not be applicable to the majority of robots in the near future. We are on the verge of two new transitions that will transform robotics. One is already under way -- the miniaturization of robots, to the point where invisible, microscopic robots could be around us and inside us, performing monitoring or even life-saving functions. We have seen systematic bio-inspired efforts to create microbe-like, microscopic robots. The trend has parallels with miniaturization in the electronics industry, where exponentially smaller and more energy efficient units have been produced each generation. To put this statement in context, examples already include magnetic microswimmer robots, employing bacterial modes of locomotion, which are biocompatible, potentially ready for integration within our bodies. They require lithography to create clever microscopic screw-type structures, enough to produce the cork-screw swimming movement. Such micro-robots have encapsulated, picked, and delivered cells, protecting them from shear forces in fluids, while others have captured non-motile sperm, propelled them, and ultimately fertilized an egg. We explore how such developments in micro-robots will change our world in the relatively near future. The second trend is bottom-up robotics, growing robots from a solution medium, as if they were bacteria. This field is emerging at the intersection of a number of disciplines, discussed below. An overarching common theme is the creation of artificial life from a non-biological starting point.

/pdf/sustainably-grown-the-underdog-robots-of-the-future-1173rrcc.pdf

Sustainably Grown: The Underdog Robots of the Future

An insect–computer hybrid robot, often referred to as a biological machine or an insect cyborg, is the fusion of a living insect platform and artificial microdevices, including stimulators, sensors

https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/S2529732518500025

Insect-Computer Hybrid Robot

Recently, insect-machine hybrid robots have been developed that incorporate insects into robots or incorporate machines into insects. Most previous studies were motivated to use the function of insects for robots, but this technology can also prove to be useful as an experimental tool for neuroethology. We reviewed hybrid robots in terms of the closed-loop between an insect, a robot, and the real environment. The incorporated biological components provided the robot sensory signals that were received by the insects and the adaptive functions of the brain. The incorporated artificial components permitted us to understand the biological system by controlling insect behavior. Hybrid robots thus extend the roles of mobile robot experiments in neuroethology for both model evaluation and brain function analysis.

Insect-machine hybrid robot.

Cyborg insect also referred as insect-machine hybrid robot, consists of a living insect platform and an electronic backpack mounted on. The small size and magnificent walking ability of the insect make this hybrid system a potential candidate for search and rescue missions. The great locomotory capability helps the insect to cope with the complex and unpredictable terrains, whereas the tiny dimension allows it to easily enter the debris of post-disaster sites. There is a necessity to establish more controllable mobility for cyborg insects to develop more efficient maneuver plans. Here, this study demonstrates the control of sideways and forward walking in a cyborg beetle by emulating the touch responses of mechanoreceptors on the insect’s elytra using the electrical stimulation. The beetle walked sideways leftward when the right elytron was stimulated, and vice versa. The forward control was attained by stimulating both elytra simultaneously. In addition, these elicited motions were found to be graded by tuning the stimulation frequency as increasing the frequency sped up the sideways walking and slowed down the forward velocity. Besides complementing the controllability of the cutting-edge cyborg insects, this graded response is essential for improving the navigation in cyborg insects for search and rescue missions.

Sideways Walking Control of a Cyborg Beetle

In this study, we describe the most ultralightweight living legged robot to date that makes it a strong candidate for a search and rescue mission. The robot is a living beetle with a wireless electronic backpack stimulator mounted on its thorax. Inheriting from the living insect, the robot employs a compliant body made of soft actuators, rigid exoskeletons, and flexure hinges. Such structure would allow the robot to easily adapt to any complex terrain due to the benefit of soft interface, self-balance, and self-adaptation of the insect without any complex controller. The antenna stimulation enables the robot to perform not only left/right turning but also backward walking and even cessation of walking. We were also able to grade the turning and backward walking speeds by changing the stimulation frequency. The power required to drive the robot is low as the power consumption of the antenna stimulation is in the order of hundreds of microwatts. In contrast to the traditional legged robots, this ro...

An Ultralightweight and Living Legged Robot

Developing small mobile robots for Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) is a major challenge due to constraints in size and power required to perform vital functions such as obstacle navigation, victim detection, and wireless communication. Drawing upon the idea that insects’ locomotion can be controlled, what if we further utilize the insects’ intrinsic ability to avoid obstacles? Herein, a cockroach hybrid robot (≈ 1.5 cm height, 5.7 cm length) that implements the abovementioned functions is developed. It is tested in an arena with randomly placed obstacles, and a motion capture system is used to track the insect's position among the untracked obstacles. A navigation algorithm that uses an inertial measurement unit (IMU) is developed to heuristically predict the insect's situation and stimulate the insect to escape nearby obstacles. The utilization of insect's intrinsic locomotor ability and low‐powered IMU reduces the onboard power load, allowing the addition of a human‐detecting function. An image classification model enables the use of an onboard low‐resolution infrared camera for human detection. Consequently, a single hybrid robot is established that includes locomotion control, autonomous navigation in obstructed areas, onboard human detection, and wireless communication, representing a significant step toward real USAR application.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/aisy.202200319

Intelligent Insect–Computer Hybrid Robot: Installing Innate Obstacle Negotiation and Onboard Human Detection onto Cyborg Insect

We demonstrated the remote control of insects in free flight via an implantable radio-equipped miniature neural stimulating system. This paper summarizes these results. The pronotum mounted system consisted of neural stimulators, muscular stimulators, a radio transceiver-equipped microcontroller and a microbattery. Flight initiation, cessation and elevation control were accomplished through neural stimulus of the brain which elicited, suppressed or modulated wing oscillation. Turns were triggered through the direct muscular stimulus of either of the basalar muscles. We characterized the response times, success rates, and free-flight trajectories elicited by our neural control systems in remotely-controlled beetles. We believe this type of technology will open the door to in-flight perturbation and recording of insect flight responses.

Vo Doan Tat Thang

Papers

An Ultralightweight and Living Legged Robot

Intelligent Insect–Computer Hybrid Robot: Installing Innate Obstacle Negotiation and Onboard Human Detection onto Cyborg Insect

Insect-machine hybrid system