The hand in the video scoops up a large beige cockroach and thrusts it into a jar of ice water. The roach struggles briefly, then grows calm as the cold anesthetizes it. It remains stoic as the hand scoops it up, sands away the waxy coating on its exoskeleton, glues down a homemade electrode bundle, and then begins surgery. We see only the extremities of the bug surgeon, who uses silly putty to secure the roach to a cutting board.
This is a roboroach, touted by its surgeon-creators as the world’s first commercially available cyborg. It’s a living, breathing, radio-controlled roach designed by Backyard Brains in a cramped suite of tatty second-floor offices next to a yoga studio in Michigan. And you can buy one, today, for yourself or your favourite precocious niece. We all know how devilishly adept a skittering cockroach is at evading capture, and being radio controlled makes it even better.
Stronger stimulus, be it an electrical jolt or a heel to the flanks, elicits a more extreme turn. Once a dollar-coin-sized, Bluetooth-linked micro-controller is connected to the header on the electrode bundle installed on the iced cockroach, anyone with a smartphone can steer the little fella in just about any direction. RoboRoach is many things to many people. A great way to learn about neural micro-stimulation.
They were founded in 2009 by two University of Michigan engineers, Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo. But the RoboRoach saga actually began a decade earlier, with the 1999 US military. A project aimed at harnessing U.S. biological research which encouraged engineers to look to the animal kingdom, where natural selection has already invested millions of years in research.
The post-op roach could then be plugged into long, lightweight control cables wired to a project box with a few dials, a battery, and directional turn buttons, and hey presto, radio-controlled roach. Katherine Scott, a Boston-based research engineer, worked in the Advanced Technologies Lab as an undergrad in 2001, clipping cockroach antennae and feeding in leads. According to Scott, the art of electrically steering a cockroach remained in the engineering toolbox.
They are now made in the billions for smartphones, tablets, and compact gaming devices: tiny accelerometers to track speed, magnetometers to find magnetic north, barometers to sense altitude change, and the like. Gage and Marzullo were graduate students working in Neural Engineering, where they met Scott.
He had met Gage and Marzullo when he was still a biomedical engineering undergrad, after he was blown away by an early SpikerBox demo Marzullo gave to his physiology class. By 2010, Reith was on the team of students working on a wireless cockroach-control senior design project at the behest of Backyard Brains. This early RoboRoach was much simpler than what’s now on sale, and was ultimately dubbed RoboRoach Beta.
The whole operation could be reliably performed outside of a lab setting with supplies any motivated geek could get at RadioShack. But the total design of it was kind of awkward and almost too big for the cockroach. Unfortunately, it depended on someone else’s mass-produced product staying on the market, and, worst of all, it didn’t allow for any innovation. So, Backyard Brains took the results and went back to the drawing board. They built a new micro-stimulation-and-control system from the ground-up.