If you’re like me, you want earn the airport security line. I’m still determined to get my luggage in and out of those x-ray scanners seamlessly and in record time, impressing anyone who clearly doesn’t care. One thing I often don’t think about, however, is that I’m being watched by more than just high-tech TSA tools.
Hidden away in airport security are sniffer dogs, using a sense of superpower to catch anyone who might be smuggling drugs, explosives, and other contraband. They use their biological sense of smell, harnessing an ability metal robots like X-ray scanners simply don’t have. But what if we could create a half-robot, half-animal being that could smell like us? A sniffer cyborg?
By a paper published in the February issue of the journal Biosensor and Bioelectronicsscientists from Tel Aviv University in Israel have announced that they have developed the first robot capable of “smelling” using a biological sensor – the antennae of a locust.
“A basic organ, like the antennae of the desert locust, can generate a unique signal for each odor,” Ben Maoz, a biomedical engineer at Tel Aviv University and co-author of the study, said via email. mail. “You don’t need the brain for that.”
Basically, the team first used a “unique device” to extend the life of a real locust antenna. They then connected the antenna to a small wheeled robot to replicate the way smell receptors in humans explore the world. Then they exposed the whole contraption to a bunch of different scents and recorded the electrical activity related to the resulting smell. This allowed the team to understand if their biohybrid robot differentiated all smells.
And it worked.
“Smell is one of the means by which we can apprehend the world,” Maoz said. “We can use it to identify good things like food [and] perfume and bad things like gas leaks [and] bad food. This concept will allow robots to help us identify things that we currently cannot.”
According to Maoz and his fellow researchers, in the animal world, insects excel in receiving and processing sensory signals.
For example, they say, a mosquito can detect a 0.01% difference in the level of carbon dioxide in the air – a far cry from what robotic sensors can do with current technology. “There are electronic sniffers,” Maoz said. “But they are limited.” In contrast, the team’s locust antenna device was able to identify a wide variety of smells such as geranium, lemon and marzipan. After a bit of practice, he was even able to discern different types of Scotch whisky.
“A comparison with standard measuring devices showed that the sensitivity of the insect’s nose in our system is about 10,000 times greater than that of devices used today,” said Yossi Yovel, a biologist at the University of Tel Aviv and co-author of the study. said in a statement.
An aerial view of the team’s robot.
Tel Aviv University
“There are many materials that we would like to identify by their unique smell – drugs, explosives, food, etc.” Maoz said, noting that it might even be possible for a later version of the team’s robot to detect the disease as well. “Currently, we use dogs. Imagine if we could replace that.”
An example of this, Maoz explain with co-author Amir Ayali of Tel Aviv University and an expert in locust biology, is with these airport magnetometers. They cost millions of dollars and can detect if we’re carrying metal devices, but “when they want to check if a passenger is smuggling drugs,” Ayali said in a statement, “they bring in a dog to sniff it out.” .
To be clear, the team’s robot is in a super early stage of development – only time will tell if the cyborg-airport-police-dog-sniffers will eventually come to fruition. But looking to the future, Maoz thinks it’s possible, and even says “the sky’s the limit” when it comes to integrating robots with biological sensors. Perhaps, he suggests, there is a way to give them the sense of sight or touch as well.
