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Among Darpa's supporters and critics are those who think the insect-cyborg program is less than practical. "There are enormous engineering problems with actually realizing remote-controlled animals," said [Peter Eckersley]. "I would say the short-term odds of Darpa's project actually succeeding are very low. It's theoretically possible, but it could take another 100 years to actually do it.
Insect cyborgs with embedded microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) will run remotely controlled reconnaissance missions for the military, if the Hybrid Insect-MEMS program succeeds. HI-MEMS, 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," said Darpa program manager Amit Lal. "The HI-MEMS program aims to develop technology that provides more control over insect locomotion, just as saddles or horseshoes are needed for horse-locomotion control."
Darpa notes that elephants also have been used for locomotion during wartime, pigeons have been used to send covert messages, canaries have detected gases in coal mines, and bees have located land mines. Now, moths and beetles are reporting for duty.
Three research groups at the University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Boyce Thompson Institute were awarded funding by Darpa-the central R&D organization for the Department of Defense-when the HI-MEMS program began earlier this year. They are expected to report preliminary results during each annual review of the three-phase program. There could be a fourth phase that transitions the technology of breeding insect battalions to the military, if the three preceding phases are successful.
"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 5 meters of a specific target located some 100 meters away using remote control or a global positioning system (GPS). If HI-MEMS passes this test, then Darpa will probably begin breeding insects in earnest. Swarms of insects with different embedded MEMS sensors-video cameras, audio microphones, chemical sniffers and more-could then penetrate enemy territory to perform reconnaissance missions that are impossible or too dangerous for soldiers.
Cyber critters
The vision of enhanced animals with electromechanical controllers was depicted in a 1990 novel, "Sparrowhawk," in which author Thomas Easton imagines bioengineering-enlarged birds and insects used as beasts of burden. In the book, reengineered birds become airliners, and enlarged beetles are used to make automobiles. The animals are harnessed with electromechanical controllers that multiplied their strength to accommodate their larger size. Under the HI-MEMS program, the reverse will happen, and electromechanical controllers will be downsized to an insect's normal dimensions.
"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 describes what our world would be like should HI-MEMS succeed. In a HI-MEMS world, insect cyborgs would patrol, gather intelligence, penetrate secret meetings, track targets, retrieve samples and more-all of which were predicted in Easton's 1990 book. However, 1990 was also the year that the watch-dog group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF; San Francisco), was founded, and that group has more than a little trepidation about Darpa realizing Easton's dreams of insect cyborgs conducting ubiquitous surveillance.
"Anyone who is just a little bit creative can imagine both useful and nonproductive 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 insects 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 cannot 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 posed by Easton in his novel. One of his favorites is using moths to catch bank robbers.
"Moths are extraordinarily sensitive to sex attractant, so instead of giving bank robbers money treated with dye, [police] could use sex attractant instead," said Easton. "Then, a moth-based HI-MEMS could find the robber by following the scent."
Bank robbers, of course, give up their privacy rights when they stage a holdup. But are the rights of others violated when a remote-controlled insect peers into someone's window while searching for the perpetrators? Or is the principle the same as when remote-controlled, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used 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 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.
Against all odds?
Among Darpa's supporters and critics are those who think the insect-cyborg program is less than practical. "There are enormous engineering problems with actually realizing remote-controlled animals," said Eckersley. "I would say the short-term odds of Darpa's project actually succeeding are very low. It's theoretically possible, but it 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 insect cyborgs, then the program could the under its own weight, because the expense of hand-building each one would favor using conventional UAVs instead.
In Easton's book, the insurgents are sophisticated enough to hack into the electronics grafted onto the 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 number of low-tech methods that would be easier to employ.
"Imagine a thousand moths released to search for insurgent activity," he said. "All the insurgents would have to do is build a bonfire to attract them, then use pesticides or bug-zappers to kill them."
Prior to the current insect-cyborg research, attempts had been made to control the locomotion of cockroaches and rats through the use of overly invasive interfaces between electronics and living tissue. The interfaces 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, which would allow 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 been able to insert a MEMS chip into an insect's pupae, with the adult hatching successfully. The ability to create true insect cyborgs with embedded electronics-where the tissue has had time to heal after surgery, and to grow during a subsequent stage of metamorphosis to completely surround the implant-is an important first step toward success.
But the researchers still have to 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," said Walker. "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 lightbulbs. We have a long way to go."
The first order of business, according to DARPA, is to design MEMS-based chips that are light enough, and that can harvest enough energy from the insect's 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 to electronically probe an insect to get it to react in 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 insectcontrol problem with no-holds-barred integration of electronics with the lifeforce functions of moths and beetles. (A swarm of other types of insects-including dragonflies, swimming insects and hopping insects-are targeted for taming if the current program is successful.)
"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 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-funded groups are 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-in a bee sting, for instance-and to dispense pheromones to control the flight of swarms.
But Darpa's ultimate plan is to hack into the insect's own natural senses, allowing the remote-control operator to look out of the insect's own eyes, instead of attaching a video camera for it to carry.
Copyright CMP Media LLC Oct 15, 2007