Researchers at North Carolina State have found a way to use cockroaches to help people in emergency situations - by turning them into cyborgs.
The insects in this project are referred to as "biobots," which the research team uses to remotely control and guide forward, left and right, according to Discovery News. This control of their movement is achieved thanks to an electronic backpack placed on the bugs.
The team also used a form of technology that provides an "invisible fence" that keeps the biobots within a certain perimeter. The goal of this fence is to keep the bugs within range of each other as well as use miniaturized solar cells to recharge the bugs' backpacks.
The cockroaches also had microphones attached to their cerci, the sensory organs used to see if their abdomen brushed against something, Gizmodo reported. Stimulating the cerci "encourages" towards sounds, in this case, people trapped in buildings or under rubble screaming for help.
Alper Bozkurt, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and senior author of two papers on the project, said the system is intended to tell the difference between calls for help and sounds that aren't important, such as a leaking pipe, Discovery News reported.
"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," he said.
Bozkurt presented the microphone sensor research paper "Acoustic Sensors for Biobotic Search and Rescue," with co-author Tahmid Latif, a Ph.D student at NC State, at the IEEE Sensors 2014 conference in Valencia, Spain, earlier this week, Science Daily reported. The presentation followed about three months after they presented the invisible fence paper, "Towards Fenceless Boundaries for Solar Powered Insect Biobots," with other researchers at the 36th Annual International IEEE EMBS Conference in Chicago.
