The species that he used for MEL has a 9-12cm wingspan and a body length of about half their wingspan. Locusts are also very robust insects, and inserting the electrodes doesn't affect their flight behavior or harm them permanently, Dawson said. The locust is then attached to a tether on the cart with a bit of melted beeswax. Dawson said the most difficult part of the project for him was finding the cart chassis. For Harding, the major challenge was getting the hardware and software to correctly recognize and interpret the locust's muscle activity.
Locusts steer by altering the movement of their wing muscles.
That sounds like an easy model to plan for but, as Harding pointed out, locusts are living creatures and they don't always behave as the theory says they should. Harding said the algorithms had to be smart enough to pick the meaningful activity out of all of the motion that occurs. Harding said he likes to imagine that the techniques used in the cart could be applied to things like bionic limbs for humans. But Dawson told him that vertebrate muscle activation signals are much more complex than they are for insects. But he does feel that perhaps the locust car might be a proof of the concept that simple devices can be built and used as sophisticated input devices for virtual reality systems.