Cyborg cockroach with camera ‘backpack’ can be steered remotely

By Matthew Sparkes

A cockroach fitted with a “backpack” computer and infrared camera, controlled by electrodes, could help locate warm bodies in the rubble of buildings destroyed by earthquakes.

Hirotaka Sato at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and his colleagues fitted Madagascar hissing cockroaches with tiny computers connected to electrodes implanted in sensory organs known as cerci on the left and right side of each insect. When a current is applied to the organ, the insect …