Please keep this creepy cockroach-inspired robot away from us

You wouldn’t want to find one in your shoe, but clever cockroaches have inspired the latest robot designs that could end up being used for search and rescue missions.

Using high-speed cameras, researchers at the University of California, Berkley, studied cockroach movements to find out how they wriggle through densely cluttered areas, particularly where the gaps between obstacles are thinner than the bugs’ oval bodies.

They found that the shape of the roaches’ shells allow them to turn on their sides and use their legs to push their way through narrow gaps between obstacles rather than trying to barrel through front-on.

Using this knowledge, they created a small, rectangular robot which struggled to get through the same obstacle course. When they equipped the six-legged bot with a more cockroach-like shell, it was much more successful. Without any programming changes, the oval-robot used the same roll manoeuvre to get through the tall, dense blades.

Lead author Chen Li explained that few studies have looked at how to get through obstacles rather than avoiding them. “The majority of robotics studies have been solving the problem of obstacles by avoiding them which largely depends on using sensors to map out the environment and algorithms that plan a path to go around the obstacles,” he said. “However, when the terrain becomes densely cluttered, especially as gaps between obstacles become comparable or even smaller than robot size, this approach runs into problems as a clear path cannot be mapped.”

“We showed that our robot can traverse grass-like beam obstacles at high probability, without adding any sensory feedback or changes in motor control, thanks to the thin, rounded shell that allows the robot body to roll to reduce terrain resistance.” Li added. “This is a terrestrial analogy of the streamlined shapes that reduce drag on birds, fish, airplanes and submarines as they move in fluids. We call this ‘terradynamic’ streamlining.”

Li and co hypothesise that there could be other natural animal shapes that are “terradynamically” suited to other tasks, like climbing or combating other types of obstacle. They plan to discover more and put them to use in further robotics.

Given that it mimics a cockroach’s shape, size and movements, it’s really no wonder that we want to keep these little robots as far away from us as possible. Pass us the bug spray, will you?