Nvidia GPUs to Help Simulate a Bee's Brain for Flying Robots
Scientists are attempting to build a flying robot that can carry out specific tasks, and can function as autonomously as a bee.
The idea is to guide the robot by the senses of vision and smell and eventually aid in search and rescue missions or, as bees do, "mechanical pollination of crops".
Covering the massive computational power of an organic brain is now small feat. For example, IBM recently estimated that the human brain is capable of more than 35 Pflops (the world's fastest supercomputer currently peaks at 20.1 Pflops). So it is not surprising that we should be starting with a brain much smaller. But even a robot with a "Green Brain" that resembles the brain power of a bee will need GPU accelerators - donated to the research project by Nvidia - to perform "the massive calculations needed to simulate a brain using a standard desktop PC – rather than on a large, expensive supercomputing cluster," the scientists leading the project at the University of Sheffield said.
The researchers hope that the project will expand our understanding of brain modeling, computational neuroscience projects, as well as the honey bee itself.
"Green Brain's modeling could help scientists to understand why honey bee numbers are dwindling and also contribute to the development of artificial pollinators, such as those being researched by the National Science Foundation-funded Robobees project, led by Harvard University," the scientists said.
*Has to be PC virus since we all know that Apple products don't get viruses. ;D
bee's knees of new tech!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcXH4iCnck4&feature=relmfu
California Company Unveils Hummingbird Spy Drone
Hopefully games that use a lot of pathfinding, such as Starcraft or SimCity, eat up less CPU resource.
Is that hard to try not to kill everything in our path that we already need alternative creatures to replace the ones we are killing to extension?
Something like this is far more likely to be used for reconnaissance missions in places like the US-Mexico border and if the drone is smart enough to patrol and return to a "base" to recharge by itself, contacting a human operator only when necessary, then the tactical possibilities are enormous.
Thats much more common than you think (google "monsanto")
Ever heard of Colony Collapse Disorder? Ever heard of using it for something else other than pollination?
For example, a synthetic version of shark skin repelled all of the bacteria and fungi from it, and maybe deployed to hospitals to counter antibiotic resistant diseases that keep breeding there.
what about the trojan that infected about 600k macs?