Artificial Honey Bee Brain Soon

In an attempt to understand the 'Artificial Intelligence (AI)' and how the animals think, the scientists from the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex are working towards creating the first accurate computer models of a honey bee brain.

They plan on taking complete control on the honey bee's vision and sense of smell by building models of the system in the brain. Based on this information they will create the first flying robot that is able to sense and act individually as a bee and not work on a pre-programmed set of instructions.

The success of this project will be faced with a challenge of modern science. The challenge is to build a robot brain that can perform complex tasks as well as the brain of an animal.

The robot is designed to perform tasks such as finding the source of particular odours or gases in the same way that a bee can identify particular flowers. The researchers anticipate that the artificial brain could eventually be used in applications such as search and rescue missions, or even mechanical pollination of crops.

"The development of an artificial brain is one of the greatest challenges in Artificial Intelligence. So far, researchers have typically studied brains such as those of rats, monkeys, and humans, but actually 'simpler' organisms such as social insects have surprisingly advanced cognitive abilities," said Dr James Marshall who is leading the EPSRC1 funded project in Sheffield.

The researchers have names this as the "Green Brain".

"Using NVIDIA's massively parallel GPU accelerators for brain models is an important goal of the project as they allow us to build faster models than ever before," explained Dr Thomas Nowotny, the leader of the Sussex team. "We expect that in many areas of science this technology will eventually replace the classic supercomputers we use today."

Green Brain's researchers foresee that developing a model of a honey bee brain will offer a more accessible method of driving forward our knowledge of how a brain's cognitive systems work, leading to advances in understanding animal and human cognition. 

"Because the honey bee brain is smaller and more accessible than any vertebrate brain, we hope to eventually be able to produce an accurate and complete model that we can test within a flying robot," said Marshall.

"Not only will this pave the way for many future advances in autonomous flying robots, but we also believe the computer modeling techniques we will be using will be widely useful to other brain modeling and computational neuroscience projects," added Nowotny.