Moths Can Drive Cars Now

If you're like me, you got a very specific image in your head when you read that headline. Maybe it was the image of a moth sitting in the drivers seat of a miniature minivan driving like its nobody's business on a table top in an industrial lab while Semisonic's Down in Flames blasts on the radio, maybe it was something completely different. Who knows?
Whatever you pictured, it was probably wrong. It looks like this:

Fourteen silk moths were hooked up to a tiny robotic vehicle that looks nothing like a minivan at Dr. Noriyasu Ando's lab at the University of Tokyo. All 14 drove the vehicle to the intended target.

The moth's steer the car by standing on a roller ball, much like those on the bottom of old mice. The balls movement controlled the movement of the car, and the moths move the ball by dancing on top of it.

Here's how the experiment went down.
Dr. Ando placed some nice smelling moth pheromone scene of an aroused female moth somewhere in a box, and put a little fan by it to make sure the male moth could smell it. The moth and his car was then placed on the other side of the box.

The male, wanting to get in on some of that sexy moth time, wildly heads towards the smell, steering the car to get there.
As Sebastian Anthony of Wired.com put it:

In all, fourteen male silk moths were tested, and they all showed a scary aptitude for steering a robot. In the tests, the moths had to guide the robot toward a source of female sex pheromone. The researchers even introduced a turning bias , where one of the robot's motors is stronger than the other, causing it to veer to one side, and yet the moths still reached the target.

Why is Dr. Ando doing all this? He and his team want to better understand the moth's antennae and sensory motor system. When these things smell sex, they jump into action quickly, and get there in no time, ever when hurdles like turning bias are introduced. Dr. Ando wants to make robots do this too, so they could, for example, locate a chemical leak or a hidden biological weapon quickly.

But Sebastian Anthony has different idea: just use the moths. Sure, right now all they can smell is pheromones, but in a couple of years we could genetically engineer moths that can sniff out dangerous chemicals, and have them steer little robots to the source. "After all," says Anthony, "why should we spend time and money on an artificial system when mother nature, as always, has already done the hard work for us?"

In this video, you can see a computer readout of two of the moths driving to the right place.