Cyborg Cockroaches with Microphone Backpacks Could Be Used in Rescue Operations
Image: Bozkurt/NCSU

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Cyborg Cockroaches with Microphone Backpacks Could Be Used in Rescue Operations

Bugs with backpacks: It almost sounds cute. Almost.

Cockroaches are ideal candidates for helping out during search and rescue operations for the same reasons that make them utterly repulsive: they can scuttle around otherwise inaccessible nooks, and killing the little monsters is pretty tough. They're also really easy to hack with all sorts of sensors and electrodes, potentially making robo-roaches—or "biobots"—invaluable to first responders who need to see what's going on in disaster areas they can't enter.

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The latest in roach hacking comes from researchers at North Carolina State University, and it almost sounds cute if you can ignore the fact that these are cockroaches we're talking about here. The researchers strapped circuit board backpacks onto the little critters and fitted them with arrays of several unidirectional microphones. By wirelessly transmitting the microphone signals to a remote computer and monitoring their amplitude, the researchers were able to estimate the source of a sound during controlled tests.

Bugs with backpacks—charming, right? Not so much. The researchers also surgically implanted electrodes into the roaches to electrically stimulate their muscles to get them to move in the direction of the sound, eventually arriving at the source. Alpert Bozkurt, the lead researcher, told me in an email that biobot cockroaches with acoustic sensors could be used to seek out and locate survivors after a disaster by following their cries for help.

"The goal is to use the biobots with high-resolution microphones to differentiate between sounds that matter, like people calling for help, from sounds that don't matter, like a leaking pipe," Bozkurt said in a university statement. "Once we've identified sounds that matter, we can use the biobots equipped with microphone arrays to zero in on where those sounds are coming from."

According to a paper Alper and his colleagues presented at yesterday's IEEE Sensors 2014 Conference in Valencia, Spain, the technology could be modified with a single omnidirectional microphone instead of an array, to record ambient sounds and send them back to first responders in real time. If, for example, a cockroach with a microphone array located a survivor, another roach with an omnidirectional mic could tag along and establish a line of communication between them and rescue personnel.

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The notion of turning bugs—cockroaches, especially—into mobile sensor networks has been around for some time, and the technology is only getting easier to implement. A $99 DIY robo roach kit successfully met its funding goal on Kickstarter last year, and scientists at Osaka University in Japan recently discovered how to turn cockroaches themselves into batteries that can power the sensors they carry. Scientists love to hack the little pests.

"It is easier to interface the neural systems of the insects with electronics because, first, their behaviors are reflex-driven and easier to modify," Bozkurt wrote me. "Second, their neural systems are less complicated. Third, they come in small sizes and we do not have any robot that can work in these sizes. Fourth, most of the biological evidence suggests that they do not experience a pain feeling as we perceive it therefore a lot of ethical questions [that] apply to vertebrate animals are relatively more relaxed for the insects."

Sound-sensing cyborg roaches have a few design challenges to overcome before they can be used in the field, if ever, and only some of them have anything to do with getting the bugs to do our bidding. We pretty much have that down in concept, though the technology isn't perfect. Bozkurt and his colleagues are experimenting with a kind of "invisible fence" to control for the bugs' natural instincts, with boundaries demarcated by an Xbox Kinect. If a roach tries to go beyond its edge, an electrical stimulus guides it back.

The researchers also need to work out the fine details of calibrating tiny microphones so they can accurately pick up minute sounds. Figuring out a way to amplify the mic signals so they can analyze farther away sounds is also on the agenda.

It remains to be seen whether disaster survivors would actually welcome the sight of circuit board-carrying cockroaches with electrodes sticking out of them scuttling towards them. Call me ungrateful, but I'd lose my shit.