The robotic bees that terrify viewers in the third season of Black Mirror could have a correlate in the real world. The plan of a neurobiologist, yes, is slightly different from that of the series. Instead of creating small automata with the characteristics of these insects, what he proposes is to study their brains so that robotics can improve their procedures.
Have you noticed, for example, that bees have multitasking abilities? At the same time they balance their flight, avoid predators and evaluate which flowers are the most conducive to their pollination work. In a study published in the journal eLifeMacquarie University neurobiologist Andrew Barron explained that speed and efficiency are critical for these insects. Therefore, the parallelism with robotics is not fanciful.
“Decision making is at the core of cognition. It is the result of an evaluation of possible results, and the life of animals is full of decisions. A honey bee has a brain smaller than a sesame seed. However, it can make decisions faster and more accurately than we can,” Barron said, noting that “a robot programmed to do the work of one of them would need the support of a supercomputer”.
The approach lies in the examination of the millions of years of evolution that converged in the design of the bees brain. Then, on how to transfer that learning to the development of robots, so that they gain greater autonomy.
Robotic bees or “bee robots”?
The Australian university team trained 20 bees to recognize flowers of various colors, each with different compounds, both sweet and bitter. With 40 hours of footage, they determined how much time they needed to make decisions.
“If the bees were sure that a flower would have food, they would quickly decide to land on it, taking an average of 0.6 seconds,” said Hadi MaBoudi, a study co-author and a computational neuroethologist at the University of Sheffield in England. “If they were sure that a flower would not have food, they would make a decision just as quickly,” he added. A longer delay (1.4 seconds on average) was recorded when they were not sure of the compound in each flower.
In the next step, the researchers developed a computational model to replicate the decision making of bees. In this process, they realized that these insects are capable of making complex decisions with minimal neural circuitry.
“We are studying how they are so quick to collect information. We believe that they use their flight movements to improve their visual system and detection. one of the best flowers”, observed James Marshall, another of the researchers involved. He is not improvised in this field: for years he has been working on the examination of algorithms that replicate the behavior of insects.
As has been said, the purpose is not to create robotic bees, but for the machines to learn from insects. After all, we are facing a reinterpretation of what “art imitates nature”. Now, so does technology. An interest that is not trivial, as artificial intelligence systems emulate human capabilities with increasing efficiency. Apparently, we are not the only source of inspiration.