Scientists at the University of Sheffield are studying the way bees adapt to their environment in order to develop a software that could lead to drones being powered by artificial intelligence software. Is that cool or what? The idea is to reverse engineer bee brains to create the drone prototype by attaching a tiny radar to their back and analyzing their flightpaths.

Bees are incredible visual navigators and they can navigate complex 3D environments with minimal learning, as opposed to typical AI and machine learning systems designed by human engineers which can’t compute what they see as efficiently as a bee.

There is also research being done for inserting a small electrode into a tethered bee’s brain while it moves around a virtual reality environment in the lab. After it navigates the VR environments and recording its brain, scientists will then correlate the neural signs with the bee’s movements. Only around 25% of a bee’s brain has been modelled, but that has already been enough for scientists to have bee-like robots flying around their labs, learning information from their surroundings.

This development can be both beneficial or bring serious consequences to the way we live. If this technology ends up in the wrong hands, our physical and digital privacy could be compromised. Also, regulators will have to be confident that having drones flying around the city will be safe, and they don’t fall from the sky injuring people.

Sounds like science fiction, right? Let’s buzz off and let scientists do their job and continue being amazed at what the 21^st century brings our way!