Cockroaches transcend
Humans constantly strive to transcend their limitations and become more than they were. Our story starts, not with wheelchair-bound people learning to walk with exo-skeletons in Japan, but with electronically assisted giant cockroaches in California.
Garnet Hertz, has developed a three-wheeled mobile robot system, controlled by a live cockroach. For reasons of hygiene and engineering, he has used a giant Madagascan hissing cockroach. The cockroach sits in a little pilot seat on top of a track-ball, where its movements make the knee-high robot, move. A trackball works like a computer mouse, when the cockroach moves, the ball, spins, and electronics translate this into wheel movement.
The Giant Madagascan hissing cockroach is about eight centimetres long, has no wings, and moves relatively slowly. They are native to the forests of Madagascar and live for about two years. When they are agitated they make a loud hissing noise out of specially modified breathing slits in their abdomen. Hertz can tell the cockroach isn't scared or in pain when using the robot because it doesn't hiss. These cockroaches can't fly, jump, or bite, and they are so clean that they find people dirty. After crawling over a human hand, they tend to spend time cleaning their feet of the oily residue from your skin.
Hertz is a graduate student of Arts, Computing and Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. As well as giving the cockroach operator control of a robot tricycle, the cockroach also has electronic feedback from a circle of lights sitting around the pilot seat. If the infrared sensors detect an obstacle ahead, the lights flash to warn the cockroach to back away, which moves the robot away. Cockroaches don't like bright lights.
Outside of this extra sense, the cockroach operator is in full control, and sometimes it will ignore the warnings and choose to ram the robot into a wall, anyway, just for fun.
Hertz has deliberately designed the system without any computers or "microcontrollers" at all, there is a just a timer chip, four infrared sensors, some lights and transistors and resistors. It could all be done with nineteen-forties technology. The cockroach is the CPU. Cockroaches don't actually have a brain, instead they have clumps of nerve cells called "ganglia" that are distributed around their body. Computer scientists have been very interested in modelling these distributed nerve clusters and how they make common-sense decisions about survival and navigation.
Hertz was directly inspired by the remote-controlled cockroach work at Professor Isao Shimoyama's Lab at the University of Tokyo. Signals from a radio remote control unit were received by the cockroach's backpack computer and used to control the cockroach's movement by electrodes implanted in their antennae. The Japanese team used the smaller American cockroach, which only lives a few months. They remove the wings. They are able to attach tiny microphones and cameras to turn the cockroach into a remotely controlled bugged bug! Researchers hope the cockroaches may be used to help find survivors in the rubble after an Earthquake.
One of these bugged cockroaches was used by spies in the movie "The Fifth Element".
So why build a cockroach controlled dalek? Is it science, or is it art?
Hertz says the project explores the relationship between technology, culture, and embodiment. This machine combines the embodiment of a cockroach with a technological system, and strives to present and examine it within a cultural context, producing tongue-in-cheek "emergent" and complex behavior akin to the goals of artificial life and artificial intelligence research. He's also built tiny backpacks for the cockroaches with webcams and microphones.
To Hertz's dismay, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA, has ongoing funding for his rivals to build several hybrid cockroach/robot systems for more war-like purposes. Hertz says after we've all killed each other with DARPA-funded biomimetic robots, the earth will be happily inhabited by cockroaches. These insects will need something to drive on all of the abandoned freeways, which is where his project comes in.