Tom Cassauwers talks about how researchers are developing computer chips inspired by honey bee brains and its influence on robotics.
Bees navigate their surroundings with amazing precision. Their brains are now inspiring the design of tiny, low-power chips that could one day guide small robots and sensors.
When bees leave the hive, they already have their own version of GPS built into their heads. By analyzing sky patterns and flight speeds, bees can figure out their location and return home safely. Researchers are now hoping to take inspiration from this and change the way we navigate computers.
“Bees find their way home without smartphones or satellite navigation,” said Anders Mikkelsen, a professor at Sweden’s Lund University. “They do this by looking at the polarization of the sky and its speed. Based on that, they don’t get lost.”
Mikkelsen is part of a group of scientists in an EU-funded initiative called InsectNeuroNano, which aims to replicate the honey bee’s internal navigation system on a computer chip. Today’s chips can already emulate the way bees find their way home, but bees do it much more efficiently than computers.
“A lightweight chip would weigh well over 80 grams and consume more than 7 watts of power,” said Mikkelsen, who is coordinating the effort. “A honey bee weighs less than a gram and uses less than one-hundredth of a watt of electricity to power its brain. Imagine if we could make a chip this efficient.”
That’s exactly what Mikkelsen’s team – researchers from universities and labs in five European countries – is trying to do. Inspired by insects, they are developing chips that can determine their location. The chip is smaller and more efficient than chips currently available for this type of navigation task.
It could potentially be used in everything from low-cost environmental sensors to insect-like robots that scavenge the environment.
“This allows us to create small insect-sized robots,” Mikkelsen said. “It’s like having a bee colony, but you can tell the bees what to do. For example, you can use these little bots to clean up pollution, build structures, or artificially pollinate fields.”
wired navigation
But why is a bee’s brain more efficient than a chip? Today’s standard chips are versatile and made to perform a variety of tasks. For example, the central processing unit, the “brain” of a computer, allows it to send e-mail, load web pages, and edit text documents.
More specialized chips, such as graphics cards, handle everything from cat photos to complex video game worlds.
The chips the InsectNeuroNano team is designing are built to do just one thing. It uses signals and speed from optical sensors attached to the chip to determine its position.
The chip is highly specialized, like a bee’s brain, evolving toward efficient navigation over generality. Although this may seem like a limitation, it allows chips to be made smaller and more energy efficient.
“Our chip can only perform one task,” Mikkelsen says. “But it can be done very efficiently and at a small size, which is a completely different strategy than other computer chips.”
From bee brain to chip
The research team’s biologists and engineers are working to bring insights from the insect world into the world of computational design. Professor Elisabetta Kikka of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands is one of the professors specializing in bio-inspired circuits and systems.
“For some problems, nature has already found compact, low-power, efficient solutions,” says Chicca. “Insect brains offer one such solution. We don’t know everything about insect brains, but we know enough to start building systems.”
Chicca used insights from biologists to build a virtual model of the chip, a task made even more difficult by the fact that insect brains are still not fully understood. “We need to formulate hypotheses about how they work so they can be translated into chips,” she said.
This type of research is also useful for biologists. Learn how insect brains work by having scientists from other fields fill in the blanks. For example, chip models could suggest how specific circuits in insect brains are wired.
“We’re learning from biologists,” Chikka said. “But biologists are also learning from us. It’s great to see that.”
The first steps of robot bees
This research will help rethink how chips work. Chips typically transmit electrical signals between components via wires. This has been the dominant model of computing for decades.
Instead, InsectNeuroNano uses nanophotonic circuits that direct light into tiny structures on a chip, just a billionth of a meter wide, in a process called photonic computing.
“Light allows us to transmit more data in a more energy-efficient way,” Mikkelsen said. “Also, our sensor detects light, so using light to sense and think makes things easier. Both of these are very important when you want a chip the size of an insect brain.”
So far, the researchers have created the first prototype chip that mimics insect brain function in a laboratory setting, with the project continuing until September 2026.
Still, Mikkelsen says it will take about 10 years for the technology to be implemented in the real world.
Making chips this small while using new design principles such as nanophotonics computing is complex. Still, the team’s efforts are already helping advance the technology, and the researchers have learned a lot in the process.
“We still have many steps to take before we have robot bees flying around,” Mikkelsen said.
“But we made a huge leap forward with this project. We went from a theoretical concept to something on the bench that mimics the insect brain.”
Their work, which still requires years of research, paves the way for insect-sized robots that can one day read and navigate the skies like real bees.
“Now we have to put the whole system together,” Mikkelsen said. “We need to scale up everything we’ve learned in the lab. The first steps have already been taken and the real progress will begin now.”
The research for this article was funded by the European Innovation Council (EIC). The views of the interviewees do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission.
This article was originally published in Horizon, EU Research and Innovation Magazine.
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