Watch a swarm of cyborg cockroaches controlled by computers

A swarm of remote-controlled cyborg cockroaches can navigate to a target location while avoiding obstacles and each other. Researchers say such swarms could be contained inside large robots and released on cue to do jobs that would take too long for a single machine, such as taking sensor readings or hunting for specific objects.

Hirotaka Sato at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and his colleagues have previously demonstrated that a Madagascar hissing cockroach (Gromphadorhina portentosa) can be controlled by a computer and steered…