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Sometimes it’s just not worth it to try to top Mother Nature. Such seems to have been the judgment by engineers at the University of Washington, who, deploring the absence of chemical sensors as fine as a moth’s antennas, opted to repurpose moth biology rather than invent new human technology. Behold the “Smellicopter.”
Mounted on a tiny drone platform with collision avoidance and other logic built in, the device is a prototype of what could be a very promising fusion of artificial and natural ingenuity.
“Nature really blows our human-made odor sensors out of the water,” admits UW grad student Melanie Anderson, lead author of the paper describing the Smellicopter, in a university news release. And in many industrial applications, sensitivity is of paramount importance.
If, for instance, you had one sensor that could detect toxic particles at a fraction of the concentration of that detectable by another, it would be a no-brainer to use the more sensitive of the two.
On the other hand, it’s no cake walk training moths to fly toward toxic plumes of gas and report back their findings. So the team (carefully) removed a common hawk moth’s antenna and mounted it on board. By passing a light current through it the platform can monitor the antenna’s general status, which changes when it is exposed to certain chemicals — such as those a moth might want to follow, a flower’s scent perhaps.
See it in action below:
In tests, the cybernetic moth-machine construct performed better than a traditional sensor of comparable size and power. The cells of the antenna, excited by the particles wafting over them, created a fast, reliable, and accurate signal for those chemicals they are built to detect. “Reprogramming” those sensitivities would be non-trivial, but far from impossible.
The little drone itself has a clever bit of engineering to keep the antenna pointed upwind. While perhaps pressure sensors and gyros might have worked to keep the craft pointing in the right direction, the team used the simple approach of a pair of large, light fins mounted on the back that have the effect of automatically turning the drone upwind, like a weather vane. If something smells good that way, off it goes.
It’s very much a prototype, but this sort of simplicity and sensitivity are no doubt attractive enough to potential customers like heavy industry and the military that the team will have offers coming in soon. You can read the paper describing the design of the Smellicopter in the journal IOP Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.
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T-minus 3u20262u20261u2026liftoff! Day one of TC Sessions: Space 2020, our first conference dedicated to space technology, early-stage startups and the brilliant minds forging a new era of space exploration, is officially underway. 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and Wish price their debuts as the 2020 IPO cycle slows”,”content”:{“rendered”:”
Today we’re digging into the IPO pricing of Upstart and Wish, perhaps the final fintech and e-commerce debuts of the year. Both unicorns priced last night and will begin trading this morning.n
But first, a programming note: The Exchange will publish through next Tuesday before taking a break until 2021; the last newsletter of the year will go out this weekend. And, just while we’re here, Equity will continue to drop, with some special episodes being compiled this week.n
n
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.n
n
Ok, enough with all of that! For what could be the very last time this year, let’s discuss IPO pricing and what the public market is telling us about these two offerings.n
![""]("https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/exchange-banner-sq-red.jpg?w=300")
Recall that we are in the wake of three IPOs that performed so insanely well that two anticipated debuts — Affirm and Roblox — decided to delay going public until they could get more confident about their pricing. So, Upstart and Wish had bonkers pricing runs, right?n
No, as it turns out.n
What is this middle-of-the-road pricing?n
I forgive you if you’ve gotten so accustomed to IPOs raising their range and pricing above the boosted interval that you’ve forgotten that it doesn’t always happen. Because it doesn’t always happen.
