By Kathleen Berger, Executive Producer for Science and Technology

Doctoral student Weilun Li never imagined what he’d be doing as a third-year PhD student in electrical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.

“It’s like a Marvel movie,” said Li. “To have a superhero or something.”

It’s not Spiderman, Antman or The Wasp – because those characters are for the comics. Rather, Li is working on very real cyborg locusts!

“Once you dig into the project, it’s actually more simple and more realistic than I thought,” said Li.

That’s because locusts seem to have superpowers with their remarkable sensing capabilities, making locusts an engineering marvel. They possess superior neural responses to follow a specific odor, such as the bomb-sniffing locusts engineered in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University. The bomb-sniffing locusts can even discriminate between the odors of different explosives.

“They can fly into some really harsh environments and sense an odor for us,” said Li.

But before going into battle, every superhero has a suit, right? In a way, so do the locusts! The insects are outfitted with backpacks that record their brain activity when exposed to odors.

“With the backpack, we can wirelessly receive all those signals sensed by our friend,” said Li.

Li is working on miniaturizing the backpacks that were first created a few years ago. Those backpacks are too heavy to wear while flying, so Li is helping to fix that problem.

“We are trying to further decrease the size and weight of our current backpack to ensure the locusts can fly for longevity, for a long distance.”

And then the plan is to guide the locusts, like a remote control.

“We electronically stimulate, try to guide him to go which direction,” said Li.

“You can control the bio-organism and steer it toward the region of interest,” said Barani Raman, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. “The main goal of the lab is to understand the design and computing principles of the sense of smell.”

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded the research group $4.3 million to help them develop the cyborg locusts and study odor-guided navigation.

“Biology actually beats engineering hands down, in terms of its complexity. And right now, since we can’t do better than biology, we can tap into the capabilities of the biological organism,” said Raman. “The goal of this particular funding is to create brain-machine interfaces to study how the insect brain works while it is sensing and converting it into a behavior.”

Eventually, Raman wants to replicate the sensing capabilities of locusts for the development of mobile robotic systems, and various sensors and devices.

“The goal for the application of the electronic nose is to noninvasively sense chemicals for different applications: biomedicine, Homeland Security, environmental monitoring, and so on.”