Automated assembly speeds up the creation of hybrid robots

A team of mechanical engineers at Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore, has developed a way to automate the process of merging live cockroaches and electronics to create cyborg cockroaches, greatly speeding up the process. In their study, available on the arXiv preprint server, the group taught a robot arm to connect electronics to living insects.

Prior research has shown that it is possible to connect electronics to live insects such as cockroaches to remotely control their behavior without hurting them. The technology is typically in the form of a small backpack containing communication and electrical processing, and probes that stimulate the insect. Stimulating the left antenna, for example, can cause a cockroach to turn left.

Research has also shown that the connection process requires time, patience and dexterity. Most researchers working on such projects have reported the process takes approximately 30 minutes.

Researchers looking to build armies of such cyborg insects have noted that the connection time is too long—creating hundreds or thousands of them for search-and-rescue efforts would cost far too much in labor. In this new study, the team in Singapore has developed a way to automate the process that not only makes the work more consistent, but gets it done in a fraction of the time.

The system works by first exposing the insects to carbon dioxide, which puts them to sleep. The cockroaches are then placed on a platform that automatically pins them down using metal rods in a way that exposes the body parts needed.

A preprogrammed computer vision system then identifies where the electronics need to go and feeds that information to a robotic arm that has been trained to pick up the electronics that are needed and then to attach them to the bug. Once they are in place, the pins retract and the bug is free to go.

The researchers found that they could produce a cyborg cockroach every 68 seconds. Testing showed that the cyborgs worked just as well as those that had been hand connected.

The research team notes that the next stage in the research is finding a way to make the cyborgs autonomous—trying to remotely direct hundreds of them at the same time is not currently feasible.

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