Featured in the report by Wired x QinetiQ. The report focuses on six key areas of advancement, exploring the technology behind them and the uses to which they can be put, while also speculating on the opportunities or challenges they may pose to the defence and security sectors.

BIOMIMICRY - FINDING GROUND-BREAKING SOLUTIONS IN NATURE

Nature-inspired technology, designed to harness the insights of millions of years of evolution, is experiencing a boom. Emerging solutions are unlocking new areas of innovation, and have particular relevance as the world looks to a more sustainable future.

We tend not to notice honeybees as they live their lives, pollinating flowers, carrying nectar back to the hive, and creating new colonies. And in the future we may be similarly oblivious as autonomous machines move around us, cleaning, carrying, and generally making our lives easier.

The ambition of Opteran, a Sheffield University spinout, is that its technology will, quite literally, be the brains behind this new era of “ubiquitous autonomy”. But rather than employing machine intelligence based on deep learning that imitates the mammalian brain, as is usual in autonomous machines, Opteran’s solution uses what it calls “natural intelligence”, reverse-engineered from the brains of the aforementioned honeybees and transferred to a silicon chip.

As CEO David Rajan points out, the human brain contains 86 billion neurons, whereas a honeybees has just a million. “But they’re extremely smart,” he says. “They’re amazing navigators and builders. They exhibit autonomous behaviour, and they do it with a brain the size of a pinhead while expending very little energy.”

Adopting this pared-down approach to intelligence and energy-saving, the company has installed its development kit on a robot dog, giving it 360-degree stabilised vision based on the compound eyes of insects, while its honeybee brain uses optic flow motion detection to navigate around naturally without colliding with objects – and all this without the need for GPS or the huge datasets associated with deep reinforcement learning. In the near future, Opteran intends to add honeybee-style decision-making to its autonomous machines.

Although Opteran was only founded in 2020, its work is based on eight years of research led by co-founders Professor James Marshall and Dr Alex Cope. As Rajan points out, nature- inspired solutions generally tend to involve such long periods of research and require specialised knowledge, often across several disciplines. “But it’s worth the effort,” he says, “Because what nature has spent hundreds of millions of years figuring out usually works so much better than what a team of software engineers can come up with.”

Technology solutions inspired by nature are nothing new, but they are growing in number. Research by the UK’s Biomimicry Innovation Lab, “The State of Nature-inspired Innovation in the UK”, found a 170 per cent increase in patents over the last ten years, with China and the US leading the way. In the UK, the predominant area for biomimicry research is engineering, followed by medicine and computer science. However, it’s possible to find applications for nature-inspired innovation in just about every industry sector.

But while research is progressing apace, the road to commercial success for nature- inspired technologies can be a long and winding one. “Many projects are unable to transition from validated technology to system completion,” says the Biomimicry Innovation Lab’s Founder and Biofuturist, Richard James MacCowan.

The journey to nature inspired success

Finding the appropriate application for an innovative, nature-inspired technology can be problematic. When Dr Anthony Brennan, a materials science and engineering professor at the University of Florida, was asked by the US Office of Naval Research to look at ways to reduce the drag on ships caused by barnacles and algae, he came up with an answer inspired by the skin of sharks, which features a slippery, diamond-shaped micropattern of millions of tiny ribs.

Some years later Brennan serendipitously discovered that an artificially created surface using the micropattern could also resist human pathogens. Today, Sharklet Technologies produces a germ-resistant, adhesive-backed film that can be attached to multi-touch surfaces such as elevator buttons and door knobs, and has found a ready new market in the era of Covid-19.

From a drone designed to mimic the flapping wings of a dragonfly, to a greenhouse inspired by a desert beetle’s shell, to wind turbines designed to look like sycamore seeds, nature-inspired solutions are increasingly proliferating. Perhaps not surprisingly, many are specifically aimed at making the world more sustainable.

Arborea, based at Imperial College’s White City Campus in London, is addressing the problem of providing food for a growing world population by producing organic, healthy ingredients with the smallest environmental impact. It has developed what it calls BioSolar Leaf technology, a solar panel-like platform made up of nutrient-rich microalgae that mimics the functioning of a real leaf, absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. The panels can be installed pretty much anywhere and at any scale, and use a thousand times less water than soil-based plants. An acre of Arborea’s BioSolar Leaf is about 120 times better at sequestering carbon dioxide and producing oxygen than an average forest of the same size.

When you see white products in daily life, from the lines on the road to sunscreen and toothpaste, it’s likely the paints and pigments used to colour them contain titanium dioxide. However, titanium mining has an environmental cost, and nanoparticles of titanium dioxide, which is non-degrading, have recently been labeled as a potential carcinogen. Looking for an alternative, Cambridge University spinout Impossible Materials took its lead from the bright white Cyphochilus beetle, which makes its home in the forest floors of southeast Asia. Its scaled exoskeleton acts as a highly optimised light-scattering structure, giving the beetle its brilliant whiteness, which can be reproduced using cellulose, offering a safe alternative to titanium dioxide.

Creating synthetic fabrics for materials such as rayon, polyester and lycra requires large amounts of energy and water, as well as producing carbon dioxide and a lot of waste. Oxford University spinout Spintex is emulating the spider, which can produce an extremely strong thread at room temperature with only protein and water. Using a unique biomimetic spinning mechanism, Spintex can create a fibre from a liquid gel just by pulling, with water the only byproduct. The process is a thousand times more energy efficient than the production of synthetic plastic fibres and no hazardous chemicals are used. As Spintex puts it, it’s a product backed by 300 million years of R&D.

The Defence Perspective

“True biomimicry attempts to mimic or copy nature in human-made things, and holds real value to future technologies and the way we function. However, what we see more prolifically, at least for now, is “bioinspiration”. This is a more open design method that draws upon nature as inspiration but is not a direct replica. Nature can teach us a lot. A human designer tends to work around what they have been taught, what they know and what they have seen before... but nature is far less constrained.

Taking the Stenocara beetle as an example: scientists have learned from the way that it collects water from sea breezes, and how it can resist the incredible heat of the desert. Studying desert insects has inspired research into new kinds of moisture collection and technologies with unique thermal properties (which could be used in heat-signature management, or packaging that keeps things cooler for longer). Likewise, understanding different terrains can help to train, prepare and protect military personnel when they are on active deployment.

This area of research is of critical importance to the defence industry and is driving various threads, among others, in the materials research space. For example, QinetiQ has a whole series of spinoff materials that are inspired by butterfly wings - these hold potential for applications in things like armour or camouflage.”

- Professor Chris Lawrence Chief Scientist Advanced Services and Products and Fellow - QinetiQ