Natural-Intelligence

Researchers at the University of Osaka and collaborators have developed a cyborg insect system that reads heartbeat activity, neural signal features, and body movement from cockroaches.

This is biomimicry by a plant, and it just shows that nothing humans create will come close to the rich and bizarre natural world.

Researchers demonstrated a lightweight navigation system inspired by honeybee learning flights that allows small drones to return home using compact visual memories rather than large-scale mapping systems.

Gecko is interesting because it is not a humanoid-robotics hype company. It is a very applied “robots + sensors + asset data” company aimed at boring but valuable infrastructure problems: corrosion, wall thinning, cracking, maintenance scheduling, shutdown reduction, and safety.

A new industry commentary argues that swarm robotics is transitioning from controlled demonstrations into real operational deployment across defence and industrial environments.

While the new AI companies have focussed on LLMs, Google has been spinning off projects from Demis Hassabis’ DeepMind, in AlphaGo, AlphaEvolve, and the Noble prize-winning AlphaFold.

Researchers at the University of Hong Kong demonstrated small snail-inspired modular robots that can physically attach to one another using suction-based coupling.

A recent patent landscape analysis highlights how biologically inspired swarm coordination methods are being displaced in some military and industrial drone systems by multi-agent reinforcement learning, while still influencing routing, resilience, and distributed control architectures.

Interspecies communication networks about threats can shape animal communities, as many species produce alarm calls while eavesdropping on those of others, resulting in information flow crossing ecological niches and taxonomic boundaries.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute researchers developed a bat-inspired sensing and navigation system that allows palm-sized drones to move through smoke, fog, and visually degraded environments using ultrasound and lightweight onboard AI.