In the video above, watch closely for the flying insect. It swerves left and right, zigzagging across the room. Nothing too remarkable, reallyuntil you realize that someone is controlling the insect. With a remote control. By attaching a tiny backpack onto a beetle, researchers can electrically stimulate tiny muscles below its wings, creating a living mini-copter that they can steer with amazing precision. (Just look at those smooth banking turns!)

Researchers have created remote-controlled crawling insects before, forcing a bugs legs to move by electrically stimulating its muscles. Its simple enough that you can even buy your own kit to commandeer a cockroach at home. But flying bugs are harder to hijack. Scientists pulled it off for the first time in 2009, when a team at the University of California, Berkeley led by engineer Michel Maharbiz debuted their first remote-controlled beetle. They used electrical stimulation to tell the beetles wings to start and stop flapping, making the beetle go up and down. But without understanding the bugs steering muscles,their lateral control left something to be desired.

Now, in a new study, the same researchers have found those musclestiny ones below the wings with a mouthful of a name:the coleopteran third axillary sclerite. Entomologists thought the muscle was only important for folding the wings back when the bugs not in flight, but it turns out that its critical for flyingand, in particular, steering. It might sound creepyis this part of a plot to create an army swarm of remote-controlled cyborg beetles to take over the world? But the story Im interested in isnt that I want to control an insect in free flight for some nefarious purpose, says Maharbiz. Its really that this kind of technology is very useful as tools to figure out whats going on in the insect.

To show how the muscle steers, the researchers fitted a giant flower beetle, just over two inches long, with a microcontroller and a wireless receiver and transmitter weighing as much as a paperclip (the bugs can carry 20 percent of their weight, so the cargowasnt a problem). Electrodes fire pulses into the beetles muscleszap the steering muscles with more frequent electrical pulses, and they contract more, turning the wing harder. About 25 seconds into the video, you can see how an increase in pulse frequency, from 70 to 90 times a second, forces the beetle into a tighter turn.

The bug in the video can only be steered left or right, but scientists could equip it to be controlled it in other directions. And the better the control gets, the more useful these bugs could potentially be outside the scope of entomological anatomy research. Like search and rescue. Just imagine: In the aftermath of an earthquake, FEMA could come to the rescue with bugs outfitted with temperature sensors, sending them to find the body heat of survivors buried in the rubble.

Engineers are developing their own robotic flyers to do the same thing, like these small flying or crawling robots. But its tough to beat the built-in flying biology of a bug. Insects are just amazing fliers compared to anything we can build at that scale, Maharbiz says. Cyborg bugs have the potential to be enormously usefuljust dont let the remote control fall in the wrong hands.

Excerpt from:

Backpack Turns a Beetle Into a Remote-Controlled Cyborg