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 BeetleBotsGiant cyborg cockroaches could be the search and rescue workers of the future CNN — The patient is submerged in an ice bath as an anesthetic for its impending surgery. When sufficient numbness is achieved, University of Queensland student Lachlan Fitzgerald begins the procedure, carefully attaching a tiny circuit board to its back to create a part-living, part-machine biohybrid robot. The patient is, in fact, a beetle, and the backpack-like device sends electrical pulses to its antennae, allowing Fitzgerald to control its movements, while tapping into its natural agility. “Only when it leaves the desired path that we want it to be on do we intervene and tell it to actually go this way instead of the way it was actually heading,” says Fitzgerald, who is studying mathematics and engineering. He hopes to create an army of insect-machine search and rescue workers. “We see a future where after an urban disaster like an earthquake or a bombing, where humans can’t safely access the disaster site, being able to send in a bunch of cyborg beetles to navigate the disaster zone quickly and efficiently,” he says. Researchers in Australia are fusing control backpacks onto beetles and cockroaches to direct their movements. The biorobotics lab where Fitzgerald works is putting control backpacks onto giant burrowing cockroaches, a species native to Australia which can grow up to three inches (eight centimeters) long, and darkling beetles. Species from the darkling family can be found scurrying through environments ranging from tropical savannas to arid deserts across the world. Having to handle the bugs doesn’t bother Fitzgerald: “No, they definitely don’t gross me out!” he says. Cyborg insects have an edge over traditional robots, according to Fitzgerald. “Insects are so adaptable compared to an artificial robotic system, which has to perform so much computation to be able to deal with all these different scenarios that might get thrown at it in the real world,” he explains. Fitzgerald says cyborg search and rescue beetles or cockroaches might be able to help in disaster situations by finding and reporting the location of survivors and delivering lifesaving drugs to them before human rescuers can get there. But first, the Australian researchers must master the ability to direct the movements of the insects, which could take a while. Fitzgerald says that although the work might seem futuristic now, in a few decades, cyborg insects could be saving lives. He’s not the only roboticist creating robots from living organisms. Academics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for example, are implanting electronic pacemakers into jellyfish to control their swimming speed. They hope the bionic jellies could help collect data about the ocean far below the surface. |
