Hasta La Gadget!

The HAMR robot is a roach-robot by researchers over at Harvard.

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What DARPA does with animal test subjects behind closed doors is one thing, but here we have something else entirely: mad-scientist kits that allow anyone at home to control the movement of a real-life cockroach. Backyard Brains, the crew behind Twitter Roach, have been selling RoboRoach sets for creating cyborg insects for some time. But today, after getting as far as they can on their own, they’re seeking Kickstarter funding to improve their design and develop “educational materials” to go with it. The project will go live in the next 30 minutes or so, and pledges of $100 or more will get you a surgery kit consisting of a PCB “backpack,” battery and three sets of electrodes. The PCB pairs with mobile devices via the Bluetooth LE profile and a companion app delivers commands to the ‘roach, allowing you to steer the creature by swiping across your screen. Cough up $150 or more and they’ll send you a dozen ‘roaches to get you started.

The electrodes we mention need to be implanted into the cockroach’s antennae so directional triggers can be sent to the nerves within — effectively fooling the creature into thinking it’s hit an obstacle and needs to change course. This is where it starts to get uncomfortable. Backyard Brains are touting the RoboRoach as an educational tool, specifically stating that “this product is not a toy.” Something that’s glossed over on the Kickstarter page, however, is the allegedly painless surgery step: how you attach the electrodes to the insect. People can make their own minds up regarding the ethics of the campaign, and can start by heading to the Kickstarter source link once it goes live at 9am ET. We’ve also embedded an old tutorial video below we found on the company’s site, which demonstrates the surgery process. Be warned: there’s antenna-clipping and other mutilations involved, which make our skin crawl even more than the thought of handling the cockroaches in the first place.

Filed under: Cellphones, Misc, Robots, Wireless, Science, Alt

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Source: Kickstarter, Backyard Brains (1), (2)

Anyone on Tatooine can tell you that Jawas are annoying pests. They wander around collecting scraps and selling droids and are just generally everywhere. Meanwhile, on Earth, it turns out that we have our own Jawa pests.


This species of cockroach – called the lucihormetica luckae – looks just like a tiny Jawa, but there’s no droid selling here. I wonder if George Lucas was a bug collector and this was his inspiration.

Sadly, the bugs might be extinct now. They were only recently discovered, living inside a volcano in Ecuador. The problem is that the volcano erupted back in 2010, and they haven’t been seen since. They just need tiny blasters.

These cockroaches look adorable – especially when they glow in the dark. Bet you never saw a Jawa do this…

Wait, doesn’t that look like EVE from WALL-E?

[via Motherboard via Kotaku]

We’ve already seen cockroaches turned into unwitting puppets for human overlords, but never have we seen dominance quite so casual as with Brittany Ransom’s recent Twitter Roach art project. While part of the exhibition, one of the insects wore a modified RoboRoach backpack with an Arduino add-on that took commands from Twitter: mentions including specific hashtags steered the roach left or right by stimulating its nerves. Yes, that meant the poor roach rarely had the dignity of seeing its master face to face, although there’s some consolation in knowing that it wore the backpack for limited periods and had a required 30-second pause between instructions.

As to why Twitter Roach came to be? Ransom tells CNET she imagined the currently dormant project as a reflection of the “overstimulation” us humans encounter in a digital world. We can certainly sympathize given our livelihoods, although its existence makes us nervous about 2013. If we’re fighting off remote-controlled insect armies a year from now, we’ll have to admit we had fair warning.

Continue reading Twitter Roach takes guidance from tweets, ushers in a terrifying 2013 (video)

Filed under: Robots, Alt

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Via: CNET

Source: Chicago Artists’ Coalition

If taking over a cockroach’s nervous system sounds like your idea of a good time, you should join up with these North Carolina State University researchers, who are having a grand old time perverting nature and ushering in humanities downfall.


These researchers are molding a commercially-available chip that could be mounted on a cockroach, along with a wireless receiver, transmitter, and controller. It sounds crazy, but when you think about it, cockroaches can get into all kinds of small places that people can’t go. Heck they can even survive a nuclear blast, or so I’ve heard. In short, they are perfect for this job. By job, I mean becoming zombies and being controlled like an R/C car, or following along a pre-determined path like in the video clip below:

They are perfect for spy missions, or as explosive carriers and anything else that our minds can dream up. All the more reason to get the Raid out and step on these suckers.

[via Geek via Geeky-Gadgets]