Jose Halloy and university colleagues in several European institutions built tiny robotic cockroaches that trick real roaches into following them.
They were trying to understand how roaches make decisions. What did they discover?
"When you observe cockroaches," says Halloy, "you see that they act as a group; they tend to stay together. So how do they do that? Is there a leader? What kind of information do they use? How do they share it?"
Check out research details and see how ordinary roaches act. The experiment was intended to show what two pieces of information cockroaches use to decide where to go. Can you guess?
It seems two factors attract the darting roach. They act on how dark it is and how many of their fellow roaches are already there.
That’s why programmed robot roaches with similar likes and dislikes to the real McCoy ... were set loose to confuse their real counterparts. They ran around ... tricking real cockroaches into doing what’s unnatural for a roach.
Sure enough … when robot critters settled under lighter disks the real cockroaches followed. Can you see these pied-piper-robot-roaches trained to lead their pesky look-alikes out of business buildings they tend to infest? Now that would be putting a roach robot's brain to work.
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