Anybody Need a Robotic Cockroach?

Dec. 30, 2009— -- The vile cockroach, one of the most despised creatures on the planet, has become the latest darling among researchers who are trying to emulate its maneuverability and economy of locomotion in the search for the perfect robot.

But the nasty cockroach is incredibly complex and it is yielding its secrets very grudgingly, to the consternation of engineers from coast to coast. Why are they so intrigued with an ugly animal that can scamper across a kitchen floor and disappear under the stove the instant the light is turned on?

Because the cockroach, it turns out, has great legs.

"Cockroaches are just amazingly stable and robust when they are running," engineering professor John Schmitt of Oregon State University said in a telephone interview. Schmitt, along with many other researchers, is trying to figure out how the cockroach can zip over a maze of blocks, some three times the height of its hips, and never miss a step.

What's amazing, Schmitt said, is the cockroach doesn't even have to think about it. That's important to robotics researchers, because the current generation of robots use so much of their energy just figuring out how to maneuver around obstacles that there's precious little juice left to do anything else.

"If we could replicate the behavior of the cockroach, that would be incredible because we would be able to make running robots that really wouldn't have to think so much about the terrain they are running over, which would allow them to use that processing power for something different," he said.

Researchers are turning to animals with legs partly because robots that depend on wheels for maneuverability can get trapped too easily, like the Mars Sojourner that got stuck against a rock in 1997. If the Sojourner had only had legs, these researchers believe, it might have been able to just step over the rock and continue on.

Many animals have inspired researchers to produce mechanical crickets, and robotic spiders, and even flying insects, but there's something special about cockroaches. A couple of years ago, researchers found that if a cockroach misses a step while scurrying across rugged terrain, it doesn't stop to see what when wrong, it just continues on its course.