This part of the Sussex Neuroscience website is a mix of material which will hopefully entertain as well as inform.
Listen to Dr Thomas Nowotny talk about his new project to build an artificial bee-brain.
"The green brain project is a collaborative project with the University of Sheffield and aims at creating models of the brain the integrate inputs from different senses with learning and decision making. Unlike its larger and older brother, the blue brain project, we are concentrating on the smaller, yet still very sophisticated, brains of honey bees and will use modern massively parallel but affordable GPU hardware. We will devise models of the visual (Sheffield) and olfactory (Sussex) system of the bee, and integrate them with reinforcement learning and decision making circuits. The entire model will run in real time on a GPU server and control an autonomous flying robot (quadrucopter), because without the closed-loop embedding in the environment our understanding of the bee brain would remain quite limited."
Further coverage of this project can be found here and here.