When Backyard Brains began pushing its open source, remote-control cockroaches on Kickstarter, the widespread reaction was, Why? The project got a lot of attention, but the public was skeptical about the claim that kids were learningreal science while driving a living creature, and nobody seemed to be able to come up with any other useful application for the technology. Now, researchers from North Carolina State University have one: lets use a swarm of cyborg cockroaches to map dangerous or uncertain areas like collapsed buildings.

Just a few months ago, a team at the same university published research into using Kinect to steer cyborg cockroaches (what they call biobots) through a predefined path. The system tracks bugs on their way through the path, exciting receptors on the insects antennae to trick it into thinking it has reached a wall, which initiates a turn reflex. Its a fairly blunt form of control, but its cheap, reliable, and easy to install. Thats an interesting little experiment, but the whole advantage of an insect minion is its size and ability to get to places its controller cannot reach or ever see. Its impractical to get a Kinect-style camera in place, and if you had the knowledge to plot a path for the bugs, you wouldnt need the bugs in the first place. So, a collaborating team came up with a whole new style of biobot control: blind wall following.

After being released into the space of interest (say, a collapsed portion of a mall) the system directs the biobots in random directions, spreading out the swarm to cover as much area as possible. Once they are disbursed enough for the controllers liking, the system directs the swarm to move in a straight line forward in whatever direction each cockroach happens to be facing. They are only to stop moving forward when they hit a wall or some other impassable object. All roaches then track along the wall for a time, following its contours and giving operators some specific but out-of-context information about the space theyre exploring.

Remember that these are totally unknown environments where GPS and other tools are useless. Only by repeating the disburse-and-wall-follow pattern several times and using a complex algorithm to assemble the individual wall segments do we get anything like a sensible map. Its not the quickest system in the world, nor the most accurate, but it could turn a two-hour hunt through wreckage into a quick trip along a known path. A few cockroaches might die in the process, but insect are a lot more expendable than first responders. Trapped individuals might be able to press a button on the biobot to signal their presence, or the roaches themselves could be outfitted with appropriate sensors.

Unfortunately, even unsettlingly giant cockroaches cant carry very much weight, so the array of sensors available is limited. Still, the researchers want to outfit some units with detectors for chemicals and radiation. Cockroaches are famous for their presumed ability to survive a nuclear apocalypse, so why not a nuclear accident? While physicists try leveraging cosmic rays to peek inside of Fukushima, a swarm of cockroaches might end up being just as good. The biobots would have to come back out of the facility before they could report their findings, but thats not a huge imposition.

Right now, the team is testing the mapping software with robots, but biobot experts at the same school are already working on plugging cyborg cockroaches into the workflow. The video above is from their prior research.

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A swarm of cyborg insects used for mapping collapsed buildings