Mind-controlling Cockroaches

September 10, 2012 by 81 Comments

Producing micro robotics is not yet easy or cost-effective, but why do we need to when we can just control the minds of cockroaches? A team or researchers from North Carolina State University is calling this augmented Madagascar Hissing cockroach an Insect Biobot in their latest research paper (PDF). It’s not the first time the subject has come up. There have already been proofs in research and even more amateur endeavors. But the accuracy and control seen in the video after the break is beyond compare.

The roach is being controlled to perfectly follow a line on the floor. One of the things that makes this iteration work so well is that the microcontroller includes a new type of ADC-based feedback loop for the stimulation of the insect brain. This helps to ensure that the roach will not grow accustom to the stimulation and stop responding to it. Since this variety of insect can live for about two years, this breakthrough makes it into a reusable tool. We’re not sure what that tool will be used for, but perhaps the next plague of insects will be controlled by man, and not mother nature.

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Coming Soon To A Store Near You: Remote-control Cockroaches

March 8, 2011 by 36 Comments

roboroach

Given a box full of cockroaches, the first thing most of us would do is try to locate the nearest source of fire. Lucky for the roaches, the team over at Backyard Brains look at things a bit differently than we do.

Their latest effort combines cockroaches and electronics to create a bio-electrical hybrid known as the RoboRoach. Using control circuitry donated from a HexBug inchworm and some 555 timers to create properly timed pulses, they have been able to control the gross movement of cockroaches. Stimulation is directly delivered to the antennae nerves of the cockroaches, enabling them to tell the roach which direction to turn and when.

Currently there are some ahem, bugs in the system, which they are working diligently to resolve. Only about 25% of the roaches they wire up can be controlled at present. Once that ratio improves however, they will be looking to offer RoboRoach as a beta product. If you are aiming to add a beetle air force to supplement your remote-controlled cockroach army, be sure to check this out.

Continue reading to see a video of the RoboRoach in action.

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Cockroach Pimps A Sweet Ride

June 11, 2010 by 36 Comments

This giant Madagascar hissing cockroach rides proudly atop his three-wheeled robotic platform. This project from several years ago is new to us and our reaction to the video after the break is mixed. We find ourselves creeped out, delighted, amazed, and saddened.

The cockroach controlled robot uses a trackball type input. A ping-pong ball is spun by a cockroach perched on top. The lucky or tortured (depending on how you look at it) little bug has an array of lights in front of it that illuminate when obstacles are in front of the robot. The roach’s natural aversion to light should make it move its legs away from that part of the display, thereby moving the robot away from the obstruction.

We’ve seen some bio-hacking in the past. There were robots that run off of rat brain cells and remote controlled beetles. But none of these projects make us want to get into this type of experimentation. How about you?

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FreeCAD Foray: Good Practices

September 11, 2025 by 27 Comments

Last time, we built a case for a PCB that handles 100 W of USB-C power, an old project that I’ve long been aiming to revive. It went well, and I’d like to believe you that the article will give you a much-needed easy-to-grasp FreeCAD introduction, Matrix knowledge upload style, having you designing stuff in no time.

Apart from my firm belief in the power of open-source software, I also do believe in social responsibilities, and I think I have a responsibility to teach you some decent FreeCAD design practices I’ve learned along the way. Some of them are going to protect your behind from mistakes, and some of them will do that while also making your project way easier to work with, for you and others.

You might not think the last part about “others” matters, but for a start, it matters in the ideal world that we’re collectively striving towards, and also, let’s be real, things like documentation are half intended for external contributors, half for you a year later. So, here’s the first FreeCAD tip that will unquestionably protect you while helping whoever else might work with the model later.

Okay, we’re all hackers, so I’ll start with zero-th FreeCAD tip – press Ctrl+S often. That’ll help a ton. Thankfully, FreeCAD’s autorecovery system has made big leaps, and it’s pretty great in case FreeCAD does crash, but the less you have to recover, the better. Now, onto the first tip.

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Behold Self-Synchronizing, Air-Flopping Limbs That Hop And Swim

May 23, 2025 by 6 Comments

Dutch research institute [AMOLF] shows off a small robot capable of walking, hopping, and swimming without any separate control system. The limbs synchronize thanks to the physical interplay between the robot’s design and its environment. There are some great videos on that project page, so be sure to check it out.

A kinked soft tube oscillates when supplied with continuous air.

Powered by a continuous stream of air blown into soft, kinked tubular limbs, the legs oscillate much like the eye-catching “tube man” many of us have seen by roadsides. At first it’s chaotic, but the movements rapidly synchronize into a meaningful rhythm that self-synchronizes and adapts. On land, the robot does a sort of hopping gait. In water, it becomes a paddling motion. The result in both cases is a fast little robot that does it all without any actual control system, relying on physics.

You can watch it in action in the video, embedded below. The full article “Physical synchronization of soft self-oscillating limbs for fast and autonomous locomotion” is also available.

Gait control is typically a nontrivial problem in robotics, but it doesn’t necessarily require a separate control system. Things like BEAM robotics and even the humble bristlebot demonstrate the ability for relatively complex behavior and locomotion to result from nothing more than the careful arrangement of otherwise simple elements.

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DIY Core Rope Memory Z80 Demonstrator Generating A Fibonacci Sequence

October 16, 2024 by 14 Comments

We’ve seen a few retro products using core rope memory, such as telephone autodiallers. Obviously, we’ve covered the Apollo program computers, but we don’t think we’ve seen a complete and functional DIY computer using core rope memory for program storage until now. [P-lab] presents their take on the technology using it to store the program for a Z80-based microprocessor demoboard, built entirely through-hole on a large chunk of veroboard.

For the uninitiated, core rope memory is a simple form of ROM where each core represents a bit in the data word. Each wire represents a single program location. Passing a wire through the core sets the corresponding bit to a logic 1, else 0. These wires are excited with an AC waveform, which is coupled to the cores that host a wire, passing along the signal to a pickup coil. This forms an array of rudimentary transformers. All that is needed is a rectifier/detector to create a stable logic signal to feed onto the data bus.

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Amputation and wound care behavior in C. floridanus (A) Illustration of a worker providing wound care on a femur-injured individual. (B) A worker amputating (biting) the injured leg at the trochanter. (C) A worker providing wound care on the newly created trochanter wound after amputation. (D) Percentage of amputations performed on ants with an infected or sterile femur (red) or tibia (blue) injury after 24 h. Numbers above the bars represent the sample size for each treatment. (E) Percentage of time the injured ant received wound care behavior over 3 h, binned in 10 min intervals, with a local polynomial regression (loess) showing a 95% confidence interval for the first 3 h after the experimental femur injury (femur, red: n = 8) and the first 3 h after amputation on the trochanter wound (trochanter, brown: n = 7).

Surgery — Not Just For Humans Anymore

July 12, 2024 by 21 Comments

Sometimes, a limb is damaged so badly that the only way to save the patient is to amputate it. Researchers have now found that humans aren’t the only species to perform life-saving amputations. [via Live Science]

While some ants have a gland that secretes antimicrobial chemicals to treat wounds in their comrades, Florida carpenter ants have lost this ability over the course of evolution. Lacking this chemical means to treat wounds, these ants have developed the first observed surgery in an animal other than humans.

When an ant has a wounded leg, its fellow ants analyze the damage. If the femur is the site of the wound, the other ants removed the damaged limb in 76% of cases by biting it off, while tibial wounds were treated in other ways. Experimental amputations of the tibia by researchers showed no difference in survivability compared to leaving the limb intact unless the amputation was performed immediately, so it seems the ants know what they’re doing.

Maybe these ants could be helpful surgical aids with some cyborg additions since they’ve already got experience? Ants can help you with programming too if that’s more your speed.

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