A Nigerian engineer and neuroscientist, Oshiorenoya Agabi has developed drones that are capable of smelling bombs far away.
The drone would be able to smell bombs several kilometers away, it could also be used for surveying farmland, refineries, manufacturing plants — anything where health and safety can be measured by an acute sense of smell.
“Imagine being able to detect odours a significant distance away with form factors which you can mount on a commercially available drone. The system will be complete with on board biological learning and classification,” he said.
This is a very big innovation because there are no silicon devices which are able to give us the level of sensitivity that we find in biology. It took the processing power of one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to simulate just one percent of human brain activity for a single second when tried by researchers from Germany and Japan.
Agabi believes “there are no practical limits to how large we can make our devices or how much we can engineer our neurons. I believe as intelligent computation goes—biology is the ultimate frontier.”
Agabi is the founder and CEO of the Silicon Valley startup, Koniku, a wetware company which is the world’s first neurocomputation company. Koniku is a privately held, venture backed company using biological neurons to interface with the real world. They build systems that use real biological neurons for sensing, control and computation.
The company is currently focused on two related technologies: the odour positioning system and the odour surveillance system. These technologies will replicate sensitivity and specificity levels only seen in biological systems, according to a report by scitechafrica.com.
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