Dogs may be man’s best friend when it comes to sniffing out bombs at airports, but they could one day be replaced by cyborg ‘insects’.

Engineers hope to exploit the locust’s incredible sense of smell to create robotic ‘noses’ inspired by the insects that could be used by homeland security officers.

The system would be capable of picking out certain smells from a jumble of other scents, just like locusts can do.

Researchers hope it could prevent attacks such as the terrorist incident yesterday, in which three suicide bombers launched a co-ordinated attack on Istanbul airport that has left at least 41 dead

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To come up with a man-made equivalent of the locust’s sense of smell, the experts will monitor neural activity from an insect’s brain while it’s exploring its surroundings and work out how it decodes the smells present

LOCUST SWARMS FLY IN HARMONY Locusts communicate with their neighbours before changing their direction of movement, according to a recent study by the universities of Bath, Warwick, and Manchester As a swarm increases in size, the locusts in it are more likely to stay on course. In a small group, the researchers found that locusts don’t really interact. But, when the numbers are increased, the locusts begin to move in a uniform direction. The mathematicians believe the insects are sensitive to randomness, so disrupting the order of their swarms could help break them apart. This could be good news for farmers, because the insects eat their own weight in food every day, threatening crops in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. Advertisement

Engineers at Washington University in St. Louis, has been given a $750,000 (£557,280) grant to use the highly sensitive locust olfactory system as the basis to create a bio-hybrid nose.

Nature trumps man-made sensors and the chemical-sensing systems responsible for our sense of smell are far more complicated that anything that’s been engineered so far, according to Baranidharan Raman, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the university.

Although the sense of smell is a primitive sense, it is preserved across many vertebrate and invertebrate species.

‘It appears that biology converged onto a solution for the problem of non-invasive, or “standoff” chemical sensing and has replicated the same design and computing principles everywhere,’ he said.

‘Therefore, understanding the fundamental olfactory processing principle is necessary to engineer solutions inspired by biology.’

For several years Dr Raman has studied how sensory signals are received and processed in the relatively simple brains of locusts.

He and his team discovered that odours prompt neural activity in the brain that allows the insect to correctly identify a particular odour, even with other smells present.

They also found that locusts trained to recognise certain smells can do so even when the trained odour was presented in complex situations, such as being mixed in with other scents or in different environments.

To come up with a man-made equivalent of the locust’s sense of smell, the experts will monitor neural activity from an insect’s brain while it’s exploring its surroundings and work out how it decodes the smells present.

Their work will require a tiny system to log and transmit the data from the locusts’ brains, which will have to be developed by the team.

Researchers hope it could prevent attacks such as the terrorist incident yesterday, in which three suicide bombers launched a co-ordinated attack on Istanbul airport that has left at least 41 dead

The experts also hope to come up with a way of using locusts as a biorobotic system to collect samples using remote control.

Srikanth Singamaneni, Associate Professor of Materials Science at Washington University will develop a silk ‘tattoo’ designed to stick to a locust’s wings that will generate milk heat, allowing the experts to steer the insects by remote control.

The tattoos will be studded with ‘plasmonic nanostructures’ which will allow the scientists to collect samples of volatile organic compounds nearby.

Using these, they will be able to analyse the chemical make-up of the compounds to work out smells the insects are detecting.

Dr Raman said: ‘The canine olfactory system still remains the state-of-the-art sensing system for many engineering applications, including homeland security and medical diagnosis.'

‘However, the difficulty and the time necessary to train and condition these animals, combined with lack of robust decoding procedures to extract the relevant chemical sending information from the biological systems, pose a significant challenge for wider application.