DARPA’s O-Circuit program looks to build a new class of biologically inspired computer equipped with odorant sensing systems that would allow drones to smell danger, such as explosives and chemical agents, using olfactory receptor neurons.
This week, US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced it will hold proposers workshop on April 10 for its Organoid Cytomorphic Intelligence Resulting from Convergent Understanding and Information Transfer (O-Circuit) program.
O-Circuit looks to merge biology with machines in order to create sniffer drones equipped with real-time learning and memory capabilities that run on minimal power.
“By harnessing the incredible efficiency of biological systems, O-Circuit aims to create self-contained, biological processing units that can learn and compute while consuming minimal energy”
DARPA, Organoid Cytomorphic Intelligence Resulting from Convergent Understanding and Information Transfer (O-Circuit) program, March 2026
Organoids are cultures grown from stem cells crafted to replicate organ capabilities while cytomorphic means having the form of a biological cell.
Combine these with intelligence and information transfer and you get what DARPA describes as “a new class of biologically inspired computer.”
“O-Circuit will develop an all-biological, converged sense-compute-act system, capable of using odorant detection information to control drone navigation tasks”
DARPA, Organoid Cytomorphic Intelligence Resulting from Convergent Understanding and Information Transfer (O-Circuit) program, March 2026
“The O-Circuit program will explore methods for improving the learning, inference, and computational memory of neural tissue systems to develop an integrated biological processing unit (BPU) that establishes a new paradigm for sense-compute-act for edge applications”
DARPA, Organoid Cytomorphic Intelligence Resulting from Convergent Understanding and Information Transfer (O-Circuit) program, March 2026
According to the announcement, the O-Circuit program will focus on engineering biological computations using biological neurons, and will have two Task Areas:
For the Architecture task area, the biological processing unit will have the ability to “learn more complex functions and retain memory” as compared to other organoid-based systems.
According to the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, “Organoids are tiny, self-organized three-dimensional tissue cultures that are derived from stem cells. Such cultures can be crafted to replicate much of the complexity of an organ, or to express selected aspects of it like producing only certain types of cells.”
For O-Circuit, DARPA is looking to update BPUs with components that are based on the learning networks of naturally occurring brains, such as mammal and insect brains.
It doesn’t say anything about human brains, but humans are mammals afterall.
“Performers could also advance the memory and learning capabilities of BPUs [Biological Processing Units]: for example, by updating BPU architectures with components that are based on the learning networks that are part of naturally occurring brains (e.g., in mammals and insects)”
DARPA, Organoid Cytomorphic Intelligence Resulting from Convergent Understanding and Information Transfer (O-Circuit) program, March 2026
For the Action task area, DARPA wants to develop an odorant sensory array that uses actual biological olfactory receptor neurons to sniff out and detect certain threats.
These “operationally relevant odorants” include, but are not limited to, explosives precursors, chemical agent surrogates, and toxic industrial chemicals.
The Action task area will be merged with the Architecture task area, so “performers will be expected to integrate the olfactory-enabled BPU with a drone navigation platform and demonstrate real-time, 2D+ physical navigation based on odorant signals.”
“(Action) will focus on developing biological ‘wetware’ architectures that integrate a BPU, an odorant sensor array, and drone-based navigation into a sense-compute-action system that acts on the physical world”
DARPA, Organoid Cytomorphic Intelligence Resulting from Convergent Understanding and Information Transfer (O-Circuit) program, March 2026
While DARPA is in the business of research and development funding for military purposes, one can imagine other applications for this technology, and from which types of animals they may take inspiration.
According to the World Atlas, rodents can sniff-out landmines, kiwis can find food buried underground, moths can locate female sex hormones from great distances, and elephants can detect water from 12 miles away.
Dogs, too, can smell epileptic seizures before they happen.
Having biologically inspired computers equipped with the olfactory capabilities of the entire animal kingdom could produce breakthroughs in healthcare, drug detection, food safety, national defense, and a whole host of other potential areas, for good or ill.
Leading O-Circuit is program manager Jeffrey Zaleski, who joined DARPA in August 2024.
A chemistry professor of almost 30 years at Indiana University Bloomington, Dr. Zaleski published over 100 research papers, gave more than 90 conference presentations, and held four patents, according to his bio.
He is also the program manager for DARPA’s Ice Control for cold Environments (ICE) program, which takes inspiration from organisms that inhabit environments prone to ice formation and that have evolved unique biological adaptations to mitigate, and in some instances exploit, the physical properties of ice in order to survive and flourish in harsh conditions.
For DARPA, this could mean the “prevention of frostbite injuries, reduction of ice accretion on vehicles, vessels, and aircraft, decreased damage to infrastructure, maintaining aqueous solutions (potable water, medicines), solving transportation and logistics challenges (ice bridges, roads, runways), and enabling field operations.”
“DARPA created the Organoid Cytomorphic Intelligence Resulting from Convergent Understanding and Information Transfer (O-Circuit) program, which seeks to develop a new class of biologically inspired computer”
DARPA, Organoid Cytomorphic Intelligence Resulting from Convergent Understanding and Information Transfer (O-Circuit) program, March 2026
O-Circuit is tentatively planned as three (3) Phases:
Registrations for the O-Circuit proposers workshop are due April 3 and the workshop itself will take place both virtually and in-person at the Executive Conference Center in Arlington, VA on April 10.
Image Source: AI-generated with ChatGPT
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