RoboRoach: Control The Movements Of A Live Cockroach With Your Phone

If you despise cockroaches as much as I do, now is your chance to get some much deserved revenge. Now you can control the movements of a live cockroach with your smartphone. Unfortunately this wasn’t designed to send the cockroach population a loud and clear message that we’ve evolved into a force to be reckoned with. Nah…it was designed as an educational tool to learn more about how our brains work.

It’s called RoboRoach, and it basically involves putting a ‘roach backpack’ on a live cockroach so you can learn from it. The RoboRoach project is a Kickstarter campaign that currently has 27 days to go. They call this the world’s first commercially available cyborg. The part roach and part machine that you’ll end up with will provide a plethora of data about our brains like the neural control of behavior, learning and memory, adapatation and habituation, stimuli selection and the effect of randomness. It’s hard to believe we could learn all this from a cockroach, right?

The only things you need to make your own RoboRoach is a live cockroach, some time and a smartphone that supports Bluetooth LE. How does it work? According to their Kickstarter page, “The backpack we invented communicates directly to the neurons via small electrical pulses. The cockroach undergoes a short surgery (under anesthesia) in which wires are placed inside the antenna. Once it recovers, a backpack is temporarily placed on its back.”

For example, if you send the live cockroach a command to turn, it will think there is a wall there, and it will turn. It will basically follow your commands, and you will be able to control the movements of your own cyborg roach. You can click over to Kickstarter if you’d like to contribute to this campaign.