A big cockroach with a backpack? It's not a scene from a B-grade horror movie. It is RoboRoach, a cyborg insect that can be remotely controlled using a smartphone app.
The mind-controlled cockroach can be told to go right or left with a simple swiping motion on the screen of a readily available handset and Bluetooth. It is a project of Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo from the University of Michigan and the guys behind Backyard Brains that initiated the project.
"We want to create neural interfaces that the general public can use. Typically, to understand how these hardware devices and biological interfaces work, you'd have to go to graduate school in a neuro-engineering lab," said the tandem in a video on their Kickstarter page.
Knowing that a cockroach uses its antennas to find its way around, the proponents of the experiment attached a backpack that can send minute electrical spikes to the insect's brain. The bug received mild anesthesia to put the wires inside the antennae. An impulse going to an antenna tricks the brain of the bug that something is blocking its path and it has to turn to the opposite direction.
"Microstimulation is the same neurotechnology that is used to treat Parkinson's Disease and is also used in Cochlear Implants," the RoboRoach page stated.
The cyborg vermin weighs about 0.16 ounce and makes use of a 16mm coin cell battery pack to send pulse stimulations lasting 5ms to 1000s to the antenna of the RoboRoach. One can control the RoboRoach using certain iOS and Android devices.
Gage and Marzullo is trying to crowdsource the funding for the RoboRoach project so they can improve their prototypes, make cyborg insect cheaper, and give it a longer battery life.
Discovery reported that the RoboRoach is set to appear at TEDGlobal conference on June 12 in Edinburgh.
It seems a lot of people are really not fond of bugs, even when it is a cyborg cockroach. BBC reported that the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animal, an animal rights group based in England, is against projects such as Backyard Brains' RoboRoach.
"The RSPCA believes it is inappropriate to encourage children to dismantle and deconstruct insects. The fact that the neuroscientist is 'pretty certain' that this doesn't impose pain is, frankly, not certain enough," a spokesperson for the group disclosed.
