Controllable Cyborg Beetles for Swarming Search and Rescue

Robotics tries very hard to match the agility, versatility, and efficiency of animals. Some robots get very close in a few specific ways, but we're still chasing the dream of robots that can match our biological friends. One way of getting around this problem is by leveraging biology in the design of robots (and we do see a lot of bioinspiration in a variety of applications), but a more direct approach is to just make the robots themselves mostly biological. We've reported on this in the past in the context of flying insects, but this new cyborg beetle from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore is the smallest (and most controllable) yet. Here's how the Singaporean researchers, led by Professor Hirotaka Sato, describe their work in a recent paper: It is possible to use a living insect as a platform to develop a living insect-machine hybrid robot.