RoboRoach: How to control a cockroach with your smartphone
'The world's first commercially available cyborg,' the RoboRoach is a cockroach fitted with a backpack that lets smartphone users control its movements.
Eleven-year-old Paul Hasenpusch eyes his pet cockroach 'Cocky' in 1998 at his home in Cairns, Australia.
Brian Cassey/AP
This is a roach with a higher calling: You.
Billed as the 鈥渨orld's first commercially available cyborg,鈥� the RoboRoach debuted Monday on a looking to raise $10,000 for the project by next month.
The project of Backyard Brains, a startup company of scientists and engineers headed by neuroscientists Greg Gage, the RoboRoach allows smartphone users to control a cockroach鈥檚 movements with a downloadable app. Yes, there鈥檚 an app for that.
Cockroaches use antennas packed with neurons to navigate their world, . For example, when those antennas touch a wall, the neurons fire to the brain and instruct the roach to turn left or right, rather than pressing on in a hopeless show of resistance to human engineering.
This latest bit of human technology involves a 鈥渟hort surgery,鈥� under anesthesia, where the roach鈥檚 wires are filled with wires that connect to a teeny backpack fixed to its back, . It鈥檚 new owner can then use their smartphone to command that backpack to send pulses to the wires, which tell the cockroach that it has come up against a wall. And so, the roach turns, at your command.
"Controlling the RoboRoach is easy: Simply slide your finger across the screen, and the roach will move in that direction," according to a , in which the creators send vibrations of different durations and frequencies to a wired-up cockroach toddling across a table.
鈥淭his is not a gimmick,鈥� .
As of Wednesday morning, the project had raised over $3600.
Your dominion over the roach will be temporary. Roaches are smart, and after a few minutes聽 that it is being toyed with, and it will stop answering to the smartphone. With increased use, it will take more time for the roaches to respond to the smartphone command again and less time for them to remember that those wires are up to no good.
The Kickstarter page says that suiting up the bug does not hurt it. At a today, Dr. Gage, demonstrating the technology, pledged his company鈥檚 commitment to ethical science and said that the insects, ostensibly unharmed, are released back into the wild after their techy outfits are removed.
The RoboRoach鈥檚 creators also emphasize that the technology is not a toy and that it is exclusively intended for educational purposes, especially for classroom lessons in neuroscience (though you can also buy your own roach kit, complete with a dozen live roaches shipped in 鈥渁 sturdy box鈥�). 聽In a , the inventors outline a possible lesson plan for the use of RoboRoach technology that teaches, among other things, how neurons carry information about touch and how muscles move. They also note that the technology is a potentially low cost solution for underfunded and underserved science classrooms.
The paper does not include advice for parents鈥� whose children come home with pilfered pet roaches.