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Swarms of miniscule drones mimicking insects being tried for dangerous human tasks
Dutch scientists have unveiled the country’s first laboratory to research how autonomous miniature drones can mimic insects to accomplish tasks ranging from finding gas leaks in factories to search-and-rescue missions.
Called the Swarming Lab, researchers at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) say they aim to put a “self-flying” swarm of 100 tiny drones in the air, able to perform around the clock tasks.
This includes the drones landing by themselves on recharging pods and taking off again to continue flying — without humans ever having to get involved.
“We are working not only to get these robots to be aware of one another, but also work together to complete complex tasks,” said Guido de Croon, a director at TU Delft’s Swarming Lab.
Tasks include the tiny drones — with the same weight as a golf ball or an egg — “sniffing out” a gas leak in a factory.
A swarm of autonomous drones, fitted with sensors to detect the gas, will be able to fly autonomously around the factory until one drone detects traces of the gas.
It will then follow the “scent” of the gas while “calling” the other drones to help in the search using on-board sensors.
“In the same way, drone swarms can also be used to detect forest fires or continuously help in search and rescue operations over large areas,” De Croon said.
The scientists use studies on bee and ant swarms or how flocks of birds behave to try to program their drone swarms to do the same.
“Drone swarm technology is the idea that when we look at nature and you see many of these animals, like ants, that individually are perhaps not so smart but together they do … things that they could definitely not do by themselves,” De Croon said. “We want to instill the same capabilities also in robots,” De Croon said.
Doing this, the scientists look at how birds or insects swarm “using very simple behaviors.”
For instance, birds “look at their closest neighbors in the flock and they do things like ‘oh, I don’t want to be too close’ because they don’t want to collide,” De Croon said. But “I also don’t want to be the only one to be away from the flock.”
They align with each other. And by following such simple rules you get these beautiful patterns that are very useful for the birds, also against predators,” he told AFP.
“So at that level, we draw inspiration and we try to make such simple rules also for robots but then for the applications we want to tackle.”
But the scientists admit there are some challenges.
“Swarms are complex systems,” De Croon said at a demonstration of the technology at the Swarming Lab, situated inside TU Delft’s Science Centre.”A single robot can do simple things within a swarm.” “It is actually quite difficult to predict, however, with these simple rules how a whole swarm will behave,” De Croon said.
The small size of the robots also hampers the amount of technology like sensors and on-board computing capacity the tiny drones can carry.
Currently, the drones at the Swarming Lab still rely on an externally mounted camera to relay information to the buzzing beasts on their positions within the swarm.
But the researchers have already developed the technology for robots to sense each other without external help. And they would n’t be the first: Scientists from Zhejiang University in China in 2022 successfully flew 10 autonomous drones through a thick bamboo forest.
Currently, the Swarming Lab, working with a start-up company of former TU Delft students called Emergent, has some 40 small drones involved in its research.
“The aim is eventually to put a swarm of around 100 drones in the air in the next five years,” said Lennart Bult, co-founder at Emergent.
Ultimately “it would be really great if we actually get a bit closer to the astonishing intelligence of tiny creatures like honeybees,” said De Croon.
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Renad Atallah is an unlikely internet sensation: a 10-year-old chef, with a repertoire of simple recipes, cooking in war-torn Gaza. She has nearly a million followers on Instagram, who’ve witnessed her delight as she unpacks parcels of food aid.
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We interviewed Renad via satellite, though we were just 50 miles away, in Tel Aviv. [Israel doesn’t allow outside journalists into Gaza, except on brief trips with the country’s military.]
“There are a lot of dishes I’d like to cook, but the ingredients aren’t available in the market,” Renad told us. “Milk used to be easy to buy, but now it’s become very expensive.”
I asked, “How does it feel when so many people like your internet videos?”
“All the comments were positive,” she said. “When I’m feeling tired or sad and I want something to cheer me up, I read the comments.”
We sent a local camera crew to Renad’s home as she made Ful, a traditional Middle Eastern bean stew. Her older sister Noorhan says they never expected the videos to go viral. “Amazing food,” Noorhan said, who added that her sibling made her “very surprised!”
After more than a year of war, the Gaza Strip lies in ruins. Nearly everyone has been displaced from their homes. The United Nations says close to two million people are experiencing critical levels of hunger.
Hamada Shaqoura is another chef showing the outside world how Gazans are getting by, relying on food from aid packages, and cooking with a single gas burner in a tent.
Shaqoura also volunteers with the charity Watermelon Relief, which makes sweet treats for Gaza’s children.
In his videos online, Shaqoura always appears very serious. Asked why, he replied, “The situation does not call for smiling. What you see on screen will never show you how hard life is here.”
Before dawn one recent morning in Israel, we watched the UN’s World Food Program load nearly two dozen trucks with flour, headed across the border. The problem is not a lack of food; the problem is getting the food into the Gaza Strip, and into the hands of those who desperately need it.
The UN has repeatedly accused Israel of obstructing aid deliveries to Gaza. Israel’s government denies that, and claims that Hamas is hijacking aid.
“For all the actors that are on the ground, let the humanitarians do their work,” said Antoine Renard, the World Food Program’s director in the Palestinian territories.
I asked, “Some people might see these two chefs and think, well, they’re cooking, they have food.”
“They have food, but they don’t have the right food; they’re trying to accommodate with anything that they can find,” Renard said.
Even in our darkest hour, food can bring comfort. But for many in Gaza, there’s only the anxiety of not knowing where they’ll find their next meal.
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Story produced by Mikaela Bufano. Editor: Carol Ross.
See also:
“Sunday Morning” 2024 “Food Issue” recipe index
Delicious menu suggestions from top chefs, cookbook authors, food writers, restaurateurs, and the editors of Food & Wine magazine.
It’s been said the best meals come from the heart, not from a recipe book. But at this USDA kitchen, there’s no pinch of this, dash of that, no dollops or smidgens of anything. Here, nutritionists in white coats painstakingly measure every single ingredient, down to the tenth of a gram.
Sheryn Stover is expected to eat every crumb of her pizza; any tiny morsels she does miss go back to the kitchen, where they’re scrutinized like evidence of some dietary crime.
Stover (or participant #8180, as she’s known) is one of some 10,000 volunteers enrolled in a $170 million nutrition study run by the National Institutes of Health. “At 78, not many people get to do studies that are going to affect a great amount of people, and I thought this was a great opportunity to do that,” she said.
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It’s called the Nutrition for Precision Health Study. “When I tell people about the study, the reaction usually is, ‘Oh, that’s so cool, can I do it?'” said coordinator Holly Nicastro.
She explained just what “precise” precisely means: “Precision nutrition means tailoring nutrition or dietary guidance to the individual.”
The government has long offered guidelines to help us eat better. In the 1940s we had the “Basic 7.” In the ’50s, the “Basic 4.” We’ve had the “Food Wheel,” the “Food Pyramid,” and currently, “My Plate.”
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They’re all well-intentioned, except they’re all based on averages – what works best for most people, most of the time. But according to Nicastro, there is no one best way to eat. “We know from virtually every nutrition study ever conducted, we have inner individual variability,” she said. “That means we have some people that are going to respond, and some people that aren’t. There’s no one-size-fits-all.”
The study’s participants, like Stover, are all being drawn from another NIH study program called All Of Us, a massive undertaking to create a database of at least a million people who are volunteering everything from their electronic health records to their DNA. It was from that All of Us research that Stover discovered she has the gene that makes some foods taste bitter, which could explain why she ate more of one kind of food than another.
Professor Sai Das, who oversees the study at Tufts University, says the goal of precision nutrition is to drill down even deeper into those individual differences. “We’re moving away from just saying everybody go do this, to being able to say, ‘Okay, if you have X, Y and Z characteristics, then you’re more likely to respond to a diet, and somebody else that has A, B and C characteristics will be responding to the diet differently,'” Das said.
It’s a big commitment for Stover, who is one of 150 people being paid to live at a handful of test sites around the country for six weeks – two weeks at a time. It’s so precise she can’t even go for a walk without a dietary chaperone. “Well, you could stop and buy candy … God forbid, you can’t do that!” she laughed.
While she’s here, everything from her resting metabolic rate, her body fat percentage, her bone mineral content, even the microbes in her gut (digested by a machine that essentially is a smart toilet paper reading device) are being analyzed for how hers may differ from someone else’s.
Nicastro said, “We really think that what’s going on in your poop is going to tell us a lot of information about your health and how you respond to food.”
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Stover says she doesn’t mind, except for the odd sounds the machine makes. While she is a live-in participant, thousands of others are participating from their homes, where electronic wearables track all kinds of health data, including special glasses that record everything they eat, activated when someone starts chewing. Artificial intelligence can then be used to determine not only which foods the person is eating, but how many calories are consumed.
This study is expected to be wrapped up by 2027, and because of it, we may indeed know not only to eat more fruits and vegetables, but what combination of foods is really best for us. The question that even Holly Nicastro can’t answer is, will we listen? “You can lead a horse to water; you can’t make them drink,” she said. “We can tailor the interventions all day. But one hypothesis I have is that if the guidance is tailored to the individual, it’s going to make that individual more likely to follow it, because this is for me, this was designed for me.”
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Story produced by Mark Hudspeth. Editor: Ed Givnish.
“Sunday Morning” 2024 “Food Issue” recipe index
Delicious menu suggestions from top chefs, cookbook authors, food writers, restaurateurs, and the editors of Food & Wine magazine.
