Locusts in Lotuses

Building and studying a locust car has been Jeff Dawson’s dream for quite some time.

In 2000, Dawson teamed up with his good friend Ron Harding to develop the first vehicle.

Dawson says the work of other researchers inspired him to do it. After his friend sent him an article in Discover magazine about a scientist who had created a “mothmobile,” he realized he would be able to do the same thing with locusts, but much better, he says.

“The reason I felt I could do better was because one, locusts are great fliers. Two, I could build a better platform that was more biologically realistic of how locusts actually steer. And three, my PhD was all about identifying which muscles actually control the wing movements that locusts use to steer.”

In 2001, Dawson and Harding presented their locust car at a conference.

Dawson named the device it M.E.L. – an acronym for Myo-Electric Locust, but also a way to taunt his then professor, Mel Robertson, who said he wanted “nothing to do with such a crazy thing.”

Soon after, Dawson placed the car on the backburner and left Kingston to work on his PhD.

“You see, at the time, there was no real scientific purpose in creating the car,” he says. “It was literally done for fun and to simply see if we could do it. The same reason people climb Mount Everest I suppose.”

But then last year – 10 years after the original car had been designed – Dawson decided to pull the car out of mothballs and use it to conduct meaningful scientific research.

“I had the idea that it could be used for real scientific research into sensorimotor integration mechanism used by insects during flight,” he says. “I guess I always thought that, but didn’t have the wits about me to formalize it until recently.”

Dawson says he now has four constructed locust cars, and since the electronic world has changed dramatically since 2001, the quality of the devices has substantially improved.

“I’m also pleased to say that biomedical engineering has adopted our car and two biomedical engineering students are also working on projects associated with the car,” he says. “I guess my locust-car research program is taking off.”