A robotic arm that can automatically turn cockroaches into controllable cyborgs could be used to create swarms of biological robots for search missions.
at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and his colleagues have previously shown that groups of up to 20 Madagascar hissing cockroaches (Gromphadorhina portentosa) equipped with electronic backpacks can be steered across desert-like terrain. However, to be used in a real-world search-and-rescue mission, the team calculates that hundreds or thousands of cyborg insects would be needed.
鈥淐urrently, we need to prepare the cyborg insects by hand,鈥� says Sato. 鈥淪kilful students and engineers can prepare some insects in 30 minutes or so, but it is not realistic to prepare hundreds of cyborg insects this way.鈥�
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Now, Sato and his colleagues have automated the procedure, using a robotic arm and computer vision system that can manufacture a cyborg insect in around a minute.
The cockroaches are first anaesthetised with carbon dioxide and then manually placed in a structure made of two rods to expose a soft membrane underneath their hard exoskeleton. A robotic arm, equipped with a camera and an artificial intelligence vision system, then implants two electrodes into this membrane, connecting it to an electronic backpack with a microchip that can communicate with external computers.
In tests, Sato and his team found that they could control cockroaches modified using the robotic system just as well as the manually prepared versions. When placed in a half-metre square box filled with obstacles, four cyborgs could search the entire terrain in around 10 minutes.
The AI-guided robotic system could be useful for some medical applications, says at Bielefeld University in Germany, but he is less convinced about the utility of the cyborg cockroaches. They have to be controlled with an antenna, but it may not be possible to communicate with them in a collapsed building or underground. 鈥淭his would make sense if you can put a chip onto the cockroach which itself can then navigate autonomously, but by my current understanding we don鈥檛 have such a technology yet,鈥� he says.
arXiv
