Glueing tiny aerial to the backs of honeybees is not an easy task. But British researchers are convinced that if they can work out how bees visually navigate the world, they could create an arfifical insect brain that would control drones and driverless cars, and help them move more instinctively.
Currently drones and automated vehicle use GPS and programmed routes to get around, but if the signal is lost, or if ther is an obstacle in their route, they struggle to reorient themselves and pick a new path. With honeybees, whose daily job involves ferrying nectar from one point to another, evolution has already solved those problems, and engineers are keen to make use of 100 milion years of natural selection.
To determine how bees get around, scientists have attached tiny radio devices to the backs and heads of hundres of honeybees and monitored their modelled. In this way, they can work out what decisions the bees made during thier journeys, and how they altered their courses.
So far researchers have modelled per cent of the honeybee brain, largely the parts that deal with visual processing, and have created a prototype "bee-bot" wich runs on basic insect neural networks.
By reverse engineering the brains of honeybees, researchers hope to design a new kind of artificial intelligence which is based on natural neural processes rather than machine learning. With an artificial bee brain, autonomous vehicles or drones would simply be given a destination and use their own internal compass reference points to get there.
