Not the day of the locust yet, says Volvo

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Consider the locust. Not the cuddliest of creatures on this good green Earth, but it has an unexpected contribution to make to road safety. Dr. Claire Rind of Newcastle University in generally locust-free Britain has been studying these little critters, specifically the African locust. She’s been trying to work out why, when buzzing about in swarms (typical behavior for a locust), they don’t bump into one another.

“Locusts are quick-reacting and have reliable circuits. They do their computations against lots of background chatter, much like driving around town,” says Rind, whose work has caught the attention of automotive safety gurus at Volvo. Says Jonas Ekmark, preventive safety leader at the Swedish car maker, “Our original thoughts centered on pedestrian safety. If we could trace how locusts are able to avoid each other, maybe we could program our cars not to hit pedestrians.”

During the study, Rind learned that visual input is transmitted directly to the insect’s wing nerve cells, seemingly bypassing the brain. She calls this the Locust Principle. Volvo wanted to learn whether locust sensory-input routing methodologies could be built into a vehicle’s pedestrian safety system. Could a locust-inspired algorithm be synthesized and applied to a car?

“As it turns out, the locust’s processing system is much more sophisticated than the hardware/software currently available,” Ekmark says. “We have found a lowly locust has man beat, at least for now. What we learned was very encouraging. We will continue to follow interesting paths in our efforts to reach our safety vision -- to design cars that do not crash.”

This is happening right now. The Volvo XC60 has a feature called City Safety fitted as standard. At low speeds, it can bring the car to a complete halt if the vehicle in front comes to a sudden stop. “Beyond City Safety, the next step will be our first pedestrian avoidance feature,” Ekmark says. Now if Volvo could come up with a paparazzi-avoidance feature, imagine how well those cars would sell here.

-- Colin Ryan