Powering a Cyborg Beetle Without Batteries

There’s a lot of research right now being devoted to the creation of robots that are the size of insects. Those robots would be used for surveillance and monitoring – to both good and bad uses, no doubt. However, as you might imagine, the engineering issues involved in such small robots are pretty daunting. As a result, some teams have decided to skip the building robot bugs, and are instead working on using bugs themselves. Basically, they’re making cyborg bugs, with neural implants so that the bugs can be controlled from a distance.
One issue with this system, apart from the fact that the existence of cyborg insects is probably going to give you horrifying nightmares for the rest of your life, is the problem of powering the implants. Currently most proposed systems and experiments have simply used batteries. But as you might imagine, the weight and limited lifespan of batteries can pose some difficult challenges.
However, according to a paper recently published in the Journal of Micromechaanics and Microengineering, a team of researchers from the Universities of Michigan and Utah may have found a solution. The researchers, who are working with DARPA’s HI-MEMS program, have developed a prototype that allows the implants of cyborg beetles to draw power from the beat of the beetle’s wings.
The researchers created two piezoelectric energy harvesters, one attached to each wing. Piezoelectric energy is the charge that develops in certain materials, including proteins, when they’re moving mechanically. In this case, the energy comes from the beating of the beetle’s wings.  Using the harvesters on the wings, the researchers were able to draw out over 45 micro-watts of electricity per insect. Given some refinements in design, they estimate it may be possible to convert enough energy such that the harvesters alone would be sufficient to power all of the implants in the cyborg beetle.
In the meantime, if you find yourself having a nightmare about cyborg insects hunting you down, just remember that for now at least, they have batteries. And those batteries will die.