Cyborg cockroach could be the future of earthquake search and rescue | Hacker News Reader

Cyborg cockroach could be the future of earthquake search and rescue

nature.com

55 pointssohkamyung47 comments

I've been reading about this roach backpack for ~25 years - is this approach (connecting to antennae) a dead end?

A version is commercially available as a type of learning toy. https://backyardbrains.com/products/roboroachBackpack

Cockroach stories are very resilient and can survive almost anything.

I came in to say this exact same thing. I've heard this story so many times over my lifetime, the idea that this is the "future" feels like Tesla's Full Self Driving Robotaxi fleet, just a few years away every year!

It’s not a dead end per se because cockroaches are used as a model organism in neuroscience experiments. They’re just not very useful outside of academic research for the same reason that they’re useful in the lab: their brains are very simple.

I think this application would only work if they were released as a swarm, using basic triangulation of the mesh network to get them to spread out throughout the rubble, exploiting their natural ability to crawl all over the place in great numbers.

"Everyone: remain calm. Our mobile cockroach nest has just arrived and we'll be sending in the swarm, just as soon we can get them geared up and briefed. On the off-chance anyone isn't pinned and can still move their legs, please don't step on them!"

Maybe it's just me but wiring electronics into the brains of animals to remote control them seems morally wrong, even if it's "for a good cause."

Agree, though I guess it's only one step further on from fattening them up on chemically enhanced food before killing them and eating them. Which I put up with in order to eat my share of meat.

The same kind of animal you would mass-murder with chemicals if one had too many children in your house. And then sigh in relief when they are all dead.

Yes, it's just you.

All righty

A cockroach seems about as sentient as ChatGPT is.

I doubt it. At minimum, chatgpt needs to run away from painful stimuli (given a choice).

ChatGPT avoids uncomfortable conversations just fine. Both it and the cockroach are doing what their programming says.

Just like humans are. Our programming tells us to eat, socialise, reproduce, sleep, etc. and it compels us to obey our programming in more subtle or explicit ways.

Just because we pretend to be more complicated does not make us any better than cockroaches. From an ethical perspective, roaches are superior to human beings because they have never created factories and chemicals to set other living roaches alive, nor do they plan to remove their kin from a particular territory by bombing baby roaches to death by the thousands.

GPT4 might already be more so then the median cockroach.

To be coldly analytical about this: how many people discovered in rubble are successfully rescued? It makes for good TV, but finding those people, orchestrating the movement of debris, while person is potentially injured, all given the context of a wide-spread disaster seems low odds.

When the Surfside condominium collapsed in Miami (a very localized calamity), did rescuers have a genuine belief that anyone trapped underneath could still be alive and saved? From my armchair, it seemed foregone conclusion that there were going to be no survivors.

Seems much better to have a contingent of drones which can quickly canvas an area and locate survivors visibly trapped or otherwise requiring assistance on the surface.

Edit: Wiki page on the Surfside: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse Apparently four people were extracted, and three of them survived

Four people were recovered from the rubble alive (one later died) in Surfside, so that wasn’t the conclusion at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse

In the US at least, there's typically a presumption of survivors. One benefit to this is it provides "real-world" training (even if everyone's dead) - collapsed buildings are especially difficult/expensive to simulate. Rescuer safety is the major variable in deciding how much time and effort to put in.

So you'll see searches continue for an "unreasonable" period of time, both because people seem to survive in unreasonable circumstances and also because you've already got everyone out there - but once the weather turns bad, they'll usually start scaling it back or call it off (unless there's high confidence that something specific needs to happen in a specific area).

USAR teams have a variety of listening equipment to attempt to localize victims in a collapsed building, and while that ability could definitely be improved, I'm very skeptical that sending in a bunch of cockroaches to crawl all over people pinned in rubble is the best we can come up with.

To be coldly analytical in response: Surfside is a bad example. You're right that it wouldn't matter there, but that's not the use case.

On the national level, because there are few dire incidents in an affluent peaceful nation, there may not be much use for this in, say, the USA. You can solve most of its emergency problems with raw manpower and there aren't many resource constraints.

It's real use case is international, especially in times and places of war.

I can pick two out of the news right now - Ukraine, Palestine - and say it would be helpful there. But even if those wars ended, we can be certain new ones will crop up with similar conditions, where it could also be used. There will always be places, internationally, where buildings are collapsing and resources for rescue are scant to nonexistent.

What about aerial infrared for (news,) helicopters and quadcopters?

How to cost that over for disaster relief

https://universemagazine.com/en/how-nasa-helps-find-people-t... :

> Scientists affiliated with NASA developed a device called FINDER (Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response) ten years ago, which can accomplish this task rapidly. FINDER is a microwave radar capable of sensing the smallest movements through the debris.

https://spinoff.nasa.gov/FINDER-Finds-Its-Way-into-Rescuers-...

Also, "Phonon Signatures in Photon Correlations" (2023) https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.13...

I saw this in popular mechanics 30 years ago I swear to god. The movie The Fifth Element even parodies this with a “spy cockroach”.

Tech has caught up though. A cockroch robot or a swarm of them could enter small passages that are otherwise dificult and time consuming with other means. They could map the area in various ways, look for signs of life, etc. Oh, and they don’t have to look exactly like roaches. I know many are put off by the likeness to something we find not so pleasant

My understanding is that it’s not interfacing with the insect’s brain directly but is instead using electrodes to stimulate receptors that trick the insect into thinking it has felt something on its left/right side and moving accordingly.

Other approaches include inserting electrodes into muscular tissue and stimulating that to cause the muscle to move. This article also describes inserting the electrodes into moth pupae and the moth growing around the electrodes:

https://robot-watch-impress-co-jp.translate.goog/cda/news/20...

And so very obviously, surveillance. This little fellow would be a spy's/cop's wet dream of physical intrusion.

Then we get a weapons race where 1. organised crime invests in high end pest control, 2. Cops start using robotic equivalent, 3. Organised crime invests in jamming systems / robotic defence / faraday cages

inb4 Cockroaches aren't real

(Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insectothopter)

I had to close the article after seeing the hand holding the cockroach, I'm still disgusted after a couple of minutes.

If you have the same disgust don't open the article or open it with images disabled.

BTW TIL it is called katsaridaphobia.

It's a hissing cockroach, which is relatively clean and sticks to forest habitats and does not carry any human diseases, if that helps.

This particular cockroach is one of the least bothersome species of insect. Nothing to fear.

Thanks for the infos, but it isn't a logical process.

It comes deep from the guts and I cannot control it in any way, it is really a phobia and you should see how I behave when I see one, anyone, IRL.

They stop working after a while, the way it works is by stimulating their antennas and the roach's nervous system will learn to ignore it went there are no rewards to reinforce the process. It's a biological version of Mousey the robot.

After I got over my initial horror, this is pretty interesting.

I wonder if fish could be rigged up like this, too.

Yes but scientists have only recently managed to use implants to study navigation in fish [1], so we don’t know how to control them. Fish brains are significantly more complex than cockroaches so it might not be feasible.

[1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/cyborg-fish-solves-brain-s...

We control humans pretty easily through social media. Perhaps a social media for fish. We could call it "School" (trademark pending)

how is this any different or beneficial compared to having a small robot doing the same task?

A few billion years of evolution behind the machinery.

Longer active time in the field due to only needing battery for control and sensing, while using the built-in nervous system and locomotion.

A robot would require extra sensors and thousands of extra lines of code. With this technique, the victims' screams will alert rescuers to their position.

wondering this as well - the article suggests that it would be able to run for longer thanks to the vision/sensory systems being driven by a very low wattage system, requiring a much smaller battery... but I'm not convinced that a slightly larger system, perhaps with wheels or the ability to jump, would be outpaced by this particular "biohybrid"

cockroach is probably easier to grow.

And would be very useful in war.

Eww.

Agreed. But I suppose to save more lives, it is worth it?

Yes. 100%.

I'm utterly disgusted by it, and also thankful for it.

These feelings are orthogonal to each other.

I suggest staying away from earthquake areas. You might survive the earthquake only to be "rescued" by one of these guys.

Too late, I'm ending a week in CDMX. The earthquake oriented infrastructure is interesting. Long external horizontal struts are used on buildings that are irregular polygons. Often external (or "internal" but outside) staircases are reinforced and joined to the rest of the building. The skycraper architecture starting in the mid-1950s was a proving ground for architectural techniques that were studied internationally, including by Japan.

As a veteran-ish roboticist, I'm real tired of the bag of tired justifications used for robotics research in extreme environments.

On the other hand, as a veteran-ish roboticist, I'm quite convinced that future folks of my kind will be more biologist than programmer. The plethora of self healing and self optimizing biological systems available for hijacking is really astounding.

I always assumed "search and rescue" was an euphemism for military research

Apologies for lowering the level quality of the comments.. but.. PICKLE RIIIIIIIIICK!!! (I mean the whole episode, with mice, roaches, etc.)(and excuse the caps, the actor keeps shouting it in the episode)

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