We're a long way from directly controlling human minds remotely, but recent years have seen a string of breakthroughs in hacking the minds of insects. Insect brains are probably the simplest interesting brains, as insects can perform a range of tasks (flying, smelling, carrying, etc.) with brains that have numbers of neurons orders of magnitude less than those in complex vertebrates.

A fruit fly has around 100,00 neurons, compared to 85 billion in humans.

So at the conjunction of neuroscience and robotics lie insects -- their tiny brains still too complex to model completely, but offering an easy way into modelling certain parts of the brain.


It's how engineers from Sheffield and Sussex universities can claim they're preparing to upload the smell and sight parts of a bee's brain into a bee-like flying robot, enmeshed with human-created software to create a completely new "brain".

The hope is that the bee-bot could fly in areas that other robots can't fit, like a collapsed building. And it makes sense to use nature's own smell modules instead of developing new ones -- their combination of efficiency in size and operation is so far unmatched by anything synthetic. A bee-bot could smell out explosives in a warzone, or drugs in shipping containers, or any of many other myriad uses, and actually go investigate. They can even be used as little spies. Who would notice a fly sitting on the wall of a meeting room?

Read next DARPA's hypersonic Phantom Express spaceplane gets sign off to be built DARPA's hypersonic Phantom Express spaceplane gets sign off to be built

A lot of research in the area of bug brains is being funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon agency which seeks out new technologies for military use.

It's not hard to imagine a future where drones are grown on farms, with extra controls implanted at the larval stage -- a process developed by bionic researchers at North Carolina State University.


One of those Darpa-funded projects is the remote-controlled rhinoceros beetle developed at the University of California, Berkeley in 2009. It's absolutely terrifying:

[Html##<iframe width="455" height="341" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/PAeV96bTRiI?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>##]

It might well be terrifying for the beetle, too, if a beetle can feel terror. The pack that the beetle carries on its back sends impulses to the general regions responsible for controlling the right or left wing muscles, which allows the "pilot" to effectively control the beetle. The beetle is awake through all this, but the human implant overrides its ability to control its own flight.

Read next The merging of humans and machines is happening now The merging of humans and machines is happening now

Another Darpa project managed similar results with a moth.


A significant problem with mounting wireless controls on flying insects is the question of how to power them, since electronic devices need electricity to run. A big battery will weigh a flying insect down, but a small battery will run out faster. The flying beetle relies on harvesting kinetic energy from the wings as they flap, which helps, but that just wears the beetle out faster.

Research published this year by biologists and chemists at Case Western Reserve University demonstrates the viability of a "biofuel cell" that would convert food eaten by an insect into energy as the insect eats. It's a much more efficient process than converting kinetic energy (or any other kind of energy, like solar) into electrical energy for implanted devices, and greatly improves the prospect of being able to use bugs like drones or other robots.

Earlier this year Wired.co.uk reported on the development of remotely-controlled cockroaches, which are a little easier to deal with as they don't fly. In this case, the roaches don't have implants directly into their brain or nervous system, but instead the electrical engineers took advantage of the simplistic functions of cockroach antennae and cerci, which are used to detect predators. By stimulating the right side to make it seem like there is danger coming, it forces the cockroach to the left, and vice versa. It's a subtler, easier hack than direct brain implants -- kind of like how a rider controls a horse.

That heralds another kind of mind control, one that isn't quite as dystopian as the hacks for beetle and moth brains -- psychological hacks. In some cases it's easier to use external stimuli rather than internal hacking of the nervous system to achieve the same results. It could also potentially lead to tiny robot cowboys, programmed to tame insects in the wild. We can probably all agree that that would be good to see.


Insects have been sought out for mind control research because of their relatively simple brains and their useful skills, but that research feeds back into other areas that aren't insect-related. Wired.co.uk reported last week on a new kind of bone-mounted robotic arm, planned for trial in early 2013, that will be able to deliver feedback directly into the patient's nervous system. That's the same kind of graft, on a more complex level, as those we've seen in insects.

Of course, that arm won't be able to take control of its owner -- it's purely for sensory feedback -- but the implications for the future confluence of robotics and neuroscience are fascinating.

Imagine motion capture devices that rely on nerve information direct from the brain, instead of relying on cameras. The bee-bot might well be the first step towards transhuman bionic implants.