This New “Smellicopter” Drone Uses a Real Live Moth Antenna to Smell

Imagine a drone that can use smell to navigate itself. That's the innovation a team at the University of Washington invented by attaching a drone to a live moth antenna and using signals from the antenna to navigate. As the article about it notes:

“Biomimicry, the idea of using the natural world for engineering inspiration, is nothing new. But using bits of real animals is. As it turns out, however, moths are so unbelievably good at amplifying chemical signals with their antennae to detect even a single scent molecule that no human-made sensor can compete.”

In other words, this is a pretty fascinating new kind of augmented technology, where the “augmenting” consists of real body parts of animals.