Darpa Hatches Plan For Insect Cyborgs To Fly Reconnaissance

Audiodesignline
Posted: 2007-10-03 20:13:36

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Cyborg insects with embedded microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) will run remotely controlled reconnaissance missions for the military, if its '"HI-MEMS" program succeeds. Hybrid-Insect MEMS--a program hatched earlier this year at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa)--aims to harness insects the way horses were harnessed by the cavalry.

"We have used horses for locomotion in wars," according to Darpa's description by its program manager, Amit Lal. "The HI-MEMS program is aimed to develop technology that provides more control over insect locomotion, just as saddles on horseshoes are needed for horse-locomotion control."

Darpa cites that, historically, elephants have also been used for locomotion in wars, that pigeons have been used for sending covert messages, that canaries have been used to detect gases in coal mines, and that bees have been used to locate lands mines. Now it's the moths and beetles turn to report for duty, just as dogs have already done.

Three research groups at the University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Boyce Thompson Institute were awarded funding by Darpa earlier this year, when the HI-MEMS program kicked off, and are expected to report preliminary results during each annual review of the three-phase fundamental research-and-development program. There could be a fourth phase at the end--if the program is a success--that transitions the technology of breeding insect battalions to the military.

"Michigan is focusing on horned beetles, while MIT and Boyce Thompson are working with large moths," said Darpa spokesman Jan Walker. "The program's first major milestone is scheduled for January 2008, when the contractors have to demonstrate controlled, tethered flight of the insect."

The final milestone at the end of phase three will be flying a cyborg insect to within five meters of a specific target located some one hundred meters away using remote control or a global positioning system (GPS). If HI-MEMS passes this test successfully, then Darpa will probably begin breeding in earnest. Insect swarms with various sorts of different embedded MEMS sensors--video cameras, audio microphones, chemical sniffers and more--could then penetrate enemy territory in swarms to perform reconnaissance missions impossible or too dangerous for soldiers.

Imagine the Future This vision of enhanced animals with electro-mechanical controllers was imagined in a 1990 novel called Sparrowhawk, in which author Thomas Easton imagines bioengineering enlarged birds and insects to use as beasts-of-burden. In the book, reengineered birds become airliners and automobiles are made from enlarged beetles. In that dream world, these animals were harnessed with electro-mechanical controllers that multiplied their strength to accommodate their larger size. In a world with HI-MEMS, instead of genetically enlarging animals to the size of vehicles, their electro-mechanical controllers will be downsized to an insect's normal dimensions with MEMS.

"I was invited to give a talk at the kickoff meeting for Darpa's HI-MEMS research program," said Easton, also a professor at Thomas College. "Program director Amit Lal said he had read my novel, in which I posited implanting computer chips in genetically engineered insects and other animals."

Easton ended up putting his presentation online, instead of delivering it to Darpa. In it, he imagines our world should Darpa's HI-MEMS program succeed. In a HI-MEMS world, cyborg bugs would patrol, gather intelligence, penetrate secret meetings, track targets, retrieve samples and more--all predicted by Easton's 1990 book. However, also founded in 1990 was the watch-dog group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF, San Francisco), which has more than a little trepidation about Darpa realizing Easton's dreams of cyborg bugs conducting ubiquitous surveillance.

"Anyone who is just a little bit creative can imagine both useful and non-productive applications of remote-controlled animals--especially if ordinary people will mistake them for normal animals," said Peter Eckersley, staff technologist at the EFF. " Darpa likens remote-controlled insect to saddling horses, but the difference between a police officer using a horse and a police officer controlling one of these cyborg insects is that you can clearly see the police officer on the horse, whereas you can not easily see whether an insect is a cyborg. If people in a free society have to start worrying that any insect they see might be conducting surveillance, then that could seriously inhibit their ability to develop their character and express themselves."

Beyond surveillance, several other civilian applications of cyborg bugs were imagined by Easton--adding to the list of military applications he deems likely to come to pass if HI-MEMS is successful. One of his favorites is catching bank robbers.

"Moths are extraordinarily sensitive to sex attractants, so instead of giving bank robbers money treated with dye, they could use sex attractants instead," said Easton. "Then, a moth-based HI-MEMS could find the robber by following the scent."

Bank robbers, of course, cannot expect to have very strong privacy rights protection--they gave up those when they staged the holdup. But into whose window a remote-controlled animal is allowed to peer when searching for the robbers is not, in principle, different from remote controlled, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) of today.

"We are already facing privacy and humanitarian issues from the use of small remote-controlled helicopters for surveillance," said Eckersley. "They are widely used in search-and-rescue operations, but we need to decide how much we should trust the police and military with them."

Easton, on the other hand, suggests that Darpa should not hold back, but up the ante by enlisting genetic engineering to add receptors to a moth that attract it to "substances of interest."

"For instance, with genetic engineering Darpa could replace the sex attractant receptor on the moth antennae with receptors for other things, like explosives, drugs or toxins," said Easton.

If Darpa's track record is any indicator, then we have some breathing room before we have to start worrying whether that insect crawling on the wall is conducting unwarranted surveillance. Only a fraction of the wide-ranging programs that Darpa sponsors are successful--at least in the way they were originally imagined. Despite a few stunning successes, like the Internet, Darpa's history is littered with broken dreams.

"There are enormous engineering problems with actually realizing remote-controlled animals," said the EFF's Eckersley. "I would say the short-term odds of Darpa's project actually succeeding are very low--it's theoretically possible, but could take another 100 years to actually do it. In any case, we in society need to be thinking about what we want to use these things for."

If adversaries were able to easily kill Darpa's cyborg insect, then the program could die under its own weight, because of the expense of hand-building each one would then favor using conventional UAVs instead. In his book Sparrowhawk, Easton imagines that the insurgents are sophisticated enough to hack into the electronics grafted onto his enlarged animals, thereby turning the tool against its maker. But Easton maintains that insurgents today would not have to become hackers to foil animal-based surveillance, because there are a variety of low-tech methods that would be easier.

"Imagine a thousand moths released to search for insurgent activity--all the insurgents would have to do is build a bonfire to attract them, then use pesticides or bug-zappers to kill them," said Easton.

Inside Hi-MEMS Previous attempts at controlling the locomotion of cockroaches and rats were based on overly invasive interfaces between electronics and living tissue that were "bolted on" during extensive surgeries, resulting in animals too fragile to be taken out of the lab. HI-MEMS aims to solve the surgery-healing problem by placing the electronics in the insect during an early stage of metamorphosis, allowing the living tissue time to grow around the electronics components before they are ever turned on--the very definition of a cybernetic-organism, or cyborg.

So far, Darpa's funded research groups have succeeded in inserting a MEMS chip into an insect's pupae, with the adult hatching successfully. The ability to create true cyborg insects with embedded electronics--where the tissues have had time not only to heal after surgery, but also have grown during a subsequent stage of the metamorphosis to completely surround the implant--is an important first step toward success. Now all they have to do is add a radio transceiver, GPS, probes to the insect's muscles, and sensors for reconnaissance, as well as train pilots to fly an insect by remote control or microcontrollers--a tall order in anybody's book.

"To date, we have demonstrated that we can insert electronics and MEMS in the pupae stage and have the insect emerge. This is a bit like saying we know that if we heat up a wire it glows and can be used to light rooms--it took a while before we had reliable light-bulbs," said Walker. "We have a long way to go."

The first order of business, according to DARPA will be to design MEMS-based chips that are light enough, and which can harvest enough energy from the insects' movements to power its wireless transceiver, sensors and probes. In parallel with the design of these lightweight chips will be biological efforts to pinpoint just where you need to electronically-probe an insect in order to get it to react a controllable way--the way a horse reacts to a bridle.

"Our biggest obstacles are the proper placement of the probes to get maximum control over insect flight function, maintaining a low enough payload of attached MEMS so that the insect is not burdened, and to extract enough electric energy from flight and muscles to power the MEMS," said Walker.

Engineers teamed with biologists at all three contractors are attacking the insect-control problem with no-holds-barred integration of electronics with the life-force functions of moths and beetles (with a swarm of other types of insects targeted for taming if the current program is successful, including dragonflies, swimming insects and hopping insects).

"We have to investigate the right set of technologies necessary to achieve an insect system that is truly controllable and reliable," said Walker. "For this to happen, the different teams are looking at different combinations of electronics and MEMS approaches for harvesting power from insects and to control insect flight."

Besides directly stimulating muscles, Darpa also plans to investigate stimulating neural centers, stimulating sensory cells with optical cues, and projecting signals that insects ordinarily follow, such as sonar cues and olfactory cues, called pheromones.

For now, the Darpa program is concentrating on micro-miniaturizing MEMS sensors that can stream data back from video cameras, audio microphones and other sensors the insect is carrying. Next, they plan to incorporate microfluidic devices that can pack different chemicals to be delivered as payloads--for instance in a bee sting--and to dispense pheromones to control the flight of swarms. But Darpa's ultimate plan is to eventually hack into the insects own natural senses, allowing the remote-control operator to look out of the insects own eyes, instead of attaching a video camera for it to carry.

This vision of enhanced animals with electro-mechanical controllers was imagined in a 1990 novel called Sparrowhawk, in which author Thomas Easton imagines bioengineering enlarged birds and insects to use as beasts-of-burden. In the book, reengineered birds become airliners and automobiles are made from enlarged beetles. In that dream world, these animals were harnessed with electro-mechanical controllers that multiplied their strength to accommodate their larger size. In a world with HI-MEMS, instead of genetically enlarging animals to the size of vehicles, their electro-mechanical controllers will be downsized to an insect's normal dimensions with MEMS.

"I was invited to give a talk at the kickoff meeting for Darpa's HI-MEMS research program," said Easton, also a professor at Thomas College. "Program director Amit Lal said he had read my novel, in which I posited implanting computer chips in genetically engineered insects and other animals."

Easton ended up putting his presentation online, instead of delivering it to Darpa. In it, he imagines our world should Darpa's HI-MEMS program succeed. In a HI-MEMS world, cyborg bugs would patrol, gather intelligence, penetrate secret meetings, track targets, retrieve samples and more--all predicted by Easton's 1990 book. However, also founded in 1990 was the watch-dog group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF, San Francisco), which has more than a little trepidation about Darpa realizing Easton's dreams of cyborg bugs conducting ubiquitous surveillance.

"Anyone who is just a little bit creative can imagine both useful and non-productive applications of remote-controlled animals--especially if ordinary people will mistake them for normal animals," said Peter Eckersley, staff technologist at the EFF. " Darpa likens remote-controlled insect to saddling horses, but the difference between a police officer using a horse and a police officer controlling one of these cyborg insects is that you can clearly see the police officer on the horse, whereas you can not easily see whether an insect is a cyborg. If people in a free society have to start worrying that any insect they see might be conducting surveillance, then that could seriously inhibit their ability to develop their character and express themselves."

Beyond surveillance, several other civilian applications of cyborg bugs were imagined by Easton--adding to the list of military applications he deems likely to come to pass if HI-MEMS is successful. One of his favorites is catching bank robbers.

"Moths are extraordinarily sensitive to sex attractants, so instead of giving bank robbers money treated with dye, they could use sex attractants instead," said Easton. "Then, a moth-based HI-MEMS could find the robber by following the scent."

Bank robbers, of course, cannot expect to have very strong privacy rights protection--they gave up those when they staged the holdup. But into whose window a remote-controlled animal is allowed to peer when searching for the robbers is not, in principle, different from remote controlled, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) of today.

"We are already facing privacy and humanitarian issues from the use of small remote-controlled helicopters for surveillance," said Eckersley. "They are widely used in search-and-rescue operations, but we need to decide how much we should trust the police and military with them."

Easton, on the other hand, suggests that Darpa should not hold back, but up the ante by enlisting genetic engineering to add receptors to a moth that attract it to "substances of interest."

"For instance, with genetic engineering Darpa could replace the sex attractant receptor on the moth antennae with receptors for other things, like explosives, drugs or toxins," said Easton.

If Darpa's track record is any indicator, then we have some breathing room before we have to start worrying whether that insect crawling on the wall is conducting unwarranted surveillance. Only a fraction of the wide-ranging programs that Darpa sponsors are successful--at least in the way they were originally imagined. Despite a few stunning successes, like the Internet, Darpa's history is littered with broken dreams.

"There are enormous engineering problems with actually realizing remote-controlled animals," said the EFF's Eckersley. "I would say the short-term odds of Darpa's project actually succeeding are very low--it's theoretically possible, but could take another 100 years to actually do it. In any case, we in society need to be thinking about what we want to use these things for."

If adversaries were able to easily kill Darpa's cyborg insect, then the program could die under its own weight, because of the expense of hand-building each one would then favor using conventional UAVs instead. In his book Sparrowhawk, Easton imagines that the insurgents are sophisticated enough to hack into the electronics grafted onto his enlarged animals, thereby turning the tool against its maker. But Easton maintains that insurgents today would not have to become hackers to foil animal-based surveillance, because there are a variety of low-tech methods that would be easier.

"Imagine a thousand moths released to search for insurgent activity--all the insurgents would have to do is build a bonfire to attract them, then use pesticides or bug-zappers to kill them," said Easton. Previous attempts at controlling the locomotion of cockroaches and rats were based on overly invasive interfaces between electronics and living tissue that were "bolted on" during extensive surgeries, resulting in animals too fragile to be taken out of the lab. HI-MEMS aims to solve the surgery-healing problem by placing the electronics in the insect during an early stage of metamorphosis, allowing the living tissue time to grow around the electronics components before they are ever turned on--the very definition of a cybernetic-organism, or cyborg.

So far, Darpa's funded research groups have succeeded in inserting a MEMS chip into an insect's pupae, with the adult hatching successfully. The ability to create true cyborg insects with embedded electronics--where the tissues have had time not only to heal after surgery, but also have grown during a subsequent stage of the metamorphosis to completely surround the implant--is an important first step toward success. Now all they have to do is add a radio transceiver, GPS, probes to the insect's muscles, and sensors for reconnaissance, as well as train pilots to fly an insect by remote control or microcontrollers--a tall order in anybody's book.

"To date, we have demonstrated that we can insert electronics and MEMS in the pupae stage and have the insect emerge. This is a bit like saying we know that if we heat up a wire it glows and can be used to light rooms--it took a while before we had reliable light-bulbs," said Walker. "We have a long way to go."

The first order of business, according to DARPA will be to design MEMS-based chips that are light enough, and which can harvest enough energy from the insects' movements to power its wireless transceiver, sensors and probes. In parallel with the design of these lightweight chips will be biological efforts to pinpoint just where you need to electronically-probe an insect in order to get it to react a controllable way--the way a horse reacts to a bridle.

"Our biggest obstacles are the proper placement of the probes to get maximum control over insect flight function, maintaining a low enough payload of attached MEMS so that the insect is not burdened, and to extract enough electric energy from flight and muscles to power the MEMS," said Walker.

Engineers teamed with biologists at all three contractors are attacking the insect-control problem with no-holds-barred integration of electronics with the life-force functions of moths and beetles (with a swarm of other types of insects targeted for taming if the current program is successful, including dragonflies, swimming insects and hopping insects).

"We have to investigate the right set of technologies necessary to achieve an insect system that is truly controllable and reliable," said Walker. "For this to happen, the different teams are looking at different combinations of electronics and MEMS approaches for harvesting power from insects and to control insect flight."

Besides directly stimulating muscles, Darpa also plans to investigate stimulating neural centers, stimulating sensory cells with optical cues, and projecting signals that insects ordinarily follow, such as sonar cues and olfactory cues, called pheromones.

For now, the Darpa program is concentrating on micro-miniaturizing MEMS sensors that can stream data back from video cameras, audio microphones and other sensors the insect is carrying. Next, they plan to incorporate microfluidic devices that can pack different chemicals to be delivered as payloads--for instance in a bee sting--and to dispense pheromones to control the flight of swarms. But Darpa's ultimate plan is to eventually hack into the insects own natural senses, allowing the remote-control operator to look out of the insects own eyes, instead of attaching a video camera for it to carry.