This Amazing Robot Uses Antennae To Sniff Out Odors

You’ve seen robots flip, now watch them sniff.

Transcript

00:00This robot might not be as impressive-looking as one of Boston Dynamics' acrobatic automatons,

00:09but this one has a hidden trick.

00:10This is a smelling robot that can not only detect odors, but distinguish between different

00:15smells and locate them.

00:17This is PhD student Netta Cheville, one of the researchers developing the robot at Tel

00:21Aviv University.

00:22She explains that while there are other robots being developed that are looking to achieve

00:25the same thing, this one is different as it utilizes these, the antennae of locusts.

00:30I place an antenna between two electrodes.

00:33The electrodes record the neural activity from the neurons inside the antenna as a response

00:38to smell.

00:39I have a smell over here and my robot here.

00:43I run the code that activates the robot and now I'm going to apply the smell.

00:49It's a bio-hybrid robot, which the researchers say has infinite applications.

00:53Assuming that any place a dog is currently being used to detect something, their robots

00:57could eventually replace them, but they could do so without training, and the smelling robots

01:00can provide more articulate information with regards to what's been detected.

01:04And since it was recently revealed that dogs might even be able to sniff out cancer, the

01:08uses for such a device continue to grow every day.