University of Washington, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Seattle WA-98195, United States of America.
University of Washington, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seattle WA-98195, United States of America.
Bioinspir Biomim. 2020 Dec 16;16(2). doi: 10.1088/1748-3190/abbd81.
Biohybrid systems integrate living materials with synthetic devices, exploiting their respective advantages to solve challenging engineering problems. One challenge of critical importance to society is detecting and localizing airborne volatile chemicals. Many flying animals depend their ability to detect and locate the source of aerial chemical plumes for finding mates and food sources. A robot with comparable capability could reduce human hazard and drastically improve performance on tasks such as locating disaster survivors, hazardous gas leaks, incipient fires, or explosives. Three advances are needed before they can rival their biological counterparts: (1) a chemical sensor with a much faster response time that nevertheless satisfies the size, weight, and power constraints of flight, (2) a design, sensor suite, and control system that allows it to move toward the source of a plume fully autonomously while navigating obstacles, and (3) the ability to detect the plume with high specificity and sensitivity among the assortment of chemicals that invariably exist in the air. Here we address the first two, introducing a human-safe palm-sized air vehicle equipped with the odor-sensing antenna of an insect, the first odor-sensing biohybrid robot system to fly. Using this sensor along with a suite of additional navigational sensors, as well as passive wind fins, our robot orients upwind and navigates autonomously toward the source of airborne plumes. Our robot is the first flying biohybrid system to successfully perform odor localization in a confined space, and it is able to do so while detecting and avoiding obstacles in its flight path. We show that insect antennae respond more quickly than metal oxide gas sensors, enabling odor localization at an improved speed over previous flying robots. By using the insect antennae, we anticipate a feasible path toward improved chemical specificity and sensitivity by leveraging recent advances in gene editing.
生物混合系统将活体材料与合成设备集成在一起，利用各自的优势来解决具有挑战性的工程问题。对社会至关重要的一个挑战是检测和定位空气中的挥发性化学物质。许多飞行动物依靠它们检测和定位空气中化学物质羽流来源的能力来寻找配偶和食物来源。具有类似能力的机器人可以减少人类的危险，并极大地提高在寻找灾难幸存者、危险气体泄漏、初期火灾或爆炸物等任务中的性能。在与生物对手竞争之前，还需要实现三个方面的进展：（1）具有更快响应时间的化学传感器，同时满足飞行的尺寸、重量和功率限制，（2）允许其在自主导航障碍物的同时自主飞向羽流源的设计、传感器套件和控制系统，以及（3）在空气中存在的各种化学物质中具有高特异性和灵敏度的检测羽流的能力。在这里，我们解决前两个问题，引入了一种安全的手掌大小的空气飞行器，配备了昆虫的气味感应天线，这是第一个飞行的气味感应生物混合机器人系统。使用这种传感器以及一系列额外的导航传感器以及被动风翼，我们的机器人可以迎风定向并自主导航到空气羽流的源头。我们的机器人是第一个在封闭空间中成功进行气味定位的飞行生物混合系统，并且它能够在检测和避免飞行路径中的障碍物的同时做到这一点。我们表明，昆虫天线的响应速度比金属氧化物气体传感器快，从而能够以比以前的飞行机器人更快的速度进行气味定位。通过使用昆虫天线，我们预计可以通过利用基因编辑的最新进展来提高化学特异性和灵敏度。
