Researchers at North Carolina State University Combine UAS and Insect Cyborgs to Inspect Unfamiliar Territory
Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a concept that would combine UAS and insect cyborgs, aka biobots, to help inspect unfamiliar areas, such as collapsed buildings after disasters, giving humans an idea of the area that they will be inhabiting.
The tiny biobots would be used to conduct an initial flight within a defined area of the territory it is inspecting. The flight would provide data that would create a rough map of the unknown environment through an algorithm created by a custom software.
After the initial mapping, a UAS would move in to hover over another unexplored area, and the biobots would follow the UAS to repeat the mapping process, allowing for a new map to be stitched to the previous one. This process would go on until an entire area or structure has been mapped out.
Edgar Lobaton, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State, and co-author of two papers that talk about the project, described the general idea of how the biobots and UAS would work together.
“A strong radio signal from the UAV could penetrate to a certain extent into a collapsed building, keeping the biobot swarm contained,” Lobaton said via Nature World News. “And as long as we can get a signal from any part of the swarm, we are able to retrieve data on what the rest of the swarm is doing.”
Lobaton added, “based on our experimental data, we know you’re going to lose track of a few individuals, but that shouldn’t prevent you from collecting enough data for mapping.”
Lobaton also talked about previous experiments that used the biobots to map out smaller areas, but he said that this new concept would have a real, lifesaving application.
