Roaches to the rescue? When the world crumbles around us (presumably due to nuclear holocaust), popular theory says that cockroaches will still keep going … and going … and going. Now scientists are trying to harness the humble bugs endurance to assist in disasters more immediate than the end of the world. Last week, engineers at North Carolina State University presented research on rescue roaches at the IEEE Sensors conference in Valencia, Spain. They have developed a way to locate survivors in collapsed buildings using swarms of cockroaches equipped with microphones. It might look like the cockroach pictured above is simply carrying the highly sensitive microphone on its back, but the array is actually plugged into the cockroach--and its part of a larger system that lets the researchers control where the cockroach moves. The team refers to these cyborg cockroaches as biobots. “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,” co-author of the paper Alper Bozkurt said in a press release. “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.” The cyborg roaches can be steered toward survivors using the sounds picked up by the backpack, such as a cry for help, as a kind of homing beacon. To prevent the cockroaches from leaving the scene of the disaster the scientists have also developed an invisible fence that keeps the roaches inside the disaster zone. Thats nice, because cockroaches are creepy enough without having to worry about whether theyre eavesdropping on you. The fence which can also be used to steer the roaches toward sources of light, to recharge the solar-powered microphone backpacks. While other groups have created DIY cyborg roach kits before now, those were more for novelty, not disaster recovery. If they end up being used in the field, cyborg roaches will join an elite company of rescue workers, both biological and robotic. Animals are already used in search and rescue operations, and robots, including some snake-like bots, are being developed to help out. The cockroaches may also have more cyborg companions in the rescue world very soon: Bozkurt has also been working on controlling the flight of moths, using electrodes implanted during the pupal stage. popsci/article/technology/cyborg-roaches-could-help-rescue-disaster-victims?dom=PSC&loc=recent&lnk=2&con=IMG
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 03:00:00 +0000
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