Giant cyborg cockroaches could be the search and rescue workers of the future

By Amy Gunia and Hazel Pfeifer, CNN

(CNN) — The patient is submerged in an ice bath as an anesthetic for its impending surgery.

When sufficient numbness is achieved, University of Queensland student Lachlan Fitzgerald begins the procedure, carefully attaching a tiny circuit board to its back to create a part-living, part-machine biohybrid robot.

The patient is, in fact, a beetle, and the backpack-like device sends electrical pulses to its antennae, allowing Fitzgerald to control its movements, while tapping into its natural agility.

“Only when it leaves the desired path that we want it to be on do we intervene and tell it to actually go this way instead of the way it was actually heading,” says Fitzgerald, who is studying mathematics and engineering.

He hopes to create an army of insect-machine search and rescue workers. “We see a future where after an urban disaster like an earthquake or a bombing, where humans can’t safely access the disaster site, being able to send in a bunch of cyborg beetles to navigate the disaster zone quickly and efficiently,” he says.

The biorobotics lab where Fitzgerald works is putting control backpacks onto giant burrowing cockroaches, a species native to Australia which can grow up to three inches (eight centimeters) long, and darkling beetles. Species from the darkling family can be found scurrying through environments ranging from tropical savannas to arid deserts across the world.

Having to handle the bugs doesn’t bother Fitzgerald: “No, they definitely don’t gross me out!” he says.

Cyborg insects have an edge over traditional robots, according to Fitzgerald. “Insects are so adaptable compared to an artificial robotic system, which has to perform so much computation to be able to deal with all these different scenarios that might get thrown at it in the real world,” he explains.

Fitzgerald says cyborg search and rescue beetles or cockroaches might be able to help in disaster situations by finding and reporting the location of survivors and delivering lifesaving drugs to them before human rescuers can get there.

But first, the Australian researchers must master the ability to direct the movements of the insects, which could take a while. Fitzgerald says that although the work might seem futuristic now, in a few decades, cyborg insects could be saving lives.

He’s not the only roboticist creating robots from living organisms. Academics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for example, are implanting electronic pacemakers into jellyfish to control their swimming speed. They hope the bionic jellies could help collect data about the ocean far below the surface.

In September, Cornell University researchers released robots controlled by a king oyster mushroom. The robots, which sense and respond to the environment by harnessing electrical signals made by the fungus and its sensitivity to light, could have uses like sensing the soil chemistry near crops to decide when to add more fertilizer.

The rise of biohybrid robots has stirred debate about the ethics of the work, and some researchers have advocated for better regulation and oversight. Caltech academics told CNN that they worked with bioethicists to ensure its interventions don’t cause any type of stress response in the jellyfish they work with.

Fitzgerald says that beetles that have had backpacks attached to them have normal life expectancies. “So I don’t think they mind, per se,” he says. “The science is out on whether or not they’re actually conscious beings,” he adds.

He agrees that concerns about the welfare of the creatures are valid but urges people to consider the benefits: “I think the potential for this technology to save lives in an urban disaster, it really outweighs any kind of hesitancy you might have towards the field.”

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