Imagine a world in which a swarm of cockroaches is a welcoming instead of repelling sight, a world where groups of insects are useful in aiding disaster relief instead of nuisances to be avoided in the midst of the wreckage. A group of NC State professors and students have been imagining that world for years, and now they’re working to make it a reality.
The project focuses on using electrically equipped cockroaches, called biobots, to map unknown and possibly dangerous locations. Alper Bozkurt, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering spearheaded the project in 2012.
To do this, Bozkurt has collaborated with assistant professors from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Edgar Lobaton and Mihail Sichitiu. The three men, along with a team of students, equip the biobots to carry out experiments and conduct research.
Bozkurt and his team of students fit each cockroach with a small electronic backpack and attach electrodes to each roach’s antennas. Signals are then sent through those electrodes and prompt the biobots to move forward, right, left or to stop all together.
“The most challenging part is dealing with live animals that have an instinct that sometimes overrides our commands,” Sichitiu said. “This is very different from the 100-percent compliant robots that we are used to working with.”
Though the biobots are equipped with the electrodes, the researchers do not control all their movements. Instead, when a swarm of biobots enters an area, a drone confines their movements to a certain region, but within that region, the biobots move around freely.
“For mapping, we assume that the [cockroaches] are able to detect when they are in close proximity to each other,” Lobaton said. “Given that they are moving randomly in the environment, they get in proximity of each other once in a while. We call this an ‘encounter event’ and our approach makes use of encounter events to be able to estimate the geometry of the space.”
In other words, the biobots are restricted to move within a small space at a time, ensuring that they will encounter one another. When the biobots get in proximity with each other, a signal is sent to the researchers who then use algorithms to transform that data into rough maps.
After the biobots map a certain area, the drone moves to another location and waits for them to map that region as well. The process repeats until the researchers have an entire outline of the once unknown area. They can then use that information to aid in disaster relief.
“Our main application at this point is search and rescue in disaster zones,” Lobaton said. “However, this technology could be used for other applications such as detections of sources of pollutants or dangerous chemicals in the environment.”
Despite the positive and effective collaboration throughout the project, and the countless hours invested by both professors and students, the research itself is still complex and in the experimental phase.
“It would take a couple of years before we can do more realistic field experiments,” Lobaton said.
Though the researchers still have more work to complete before introducing the biobots into real-life situations, a new, and unconventional, aid to disaster relief remains a very real possibility.
