Swarms of cyborg insects controlled remotely via electrical implants can now operate underwater, thanks to tiny diving suits supplying them with oxygen - which could one day enable them to explore Mars. Hirotaka Sato at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and his colleagues first demonstrated in 2021 that Madagascar hissing cockroaches () could be remotely controlled with electrodes embedded in sensory organs known as cerci. In 2024, they demonstrated that a swarm of 20 of these cyborg insects could coordinate. The aim was to develop biological robots equipped with infrared sensors that could be released in large numbers after natural disasters to search for survivors. Cockroaches represent a ready-made platform for such applications with a working fuel source, efficient locomotion and in-built reflexes to dodge obstacles - capabilities that engineers still struggle to replicate mechanically at such a small scale.

The centimeter-scale cyborg insects have a potential advantage for application in narrow environments where humans cannot operate. To realize such tasks, researchers have developed a small printed-circuit-board (PCB) which an insect can carry and control it. The electronic components usually remain bare on the board and the whole board is mounted on platform animals, resulting in uneven morphology of whole cyborg with sharp edges. It is well known that streamlined body shape in artificial vehicles or robots contributes to effective locomotion by reducing drag force in media. However, little is known how the entire body shape impacts on locomotor performance of cyborg insect. Here, we developed a 10 mm by 10 mm board which provided electrical stimulation via Sub-GHz communication and investigated the impact of physical arrangement of the board using Madagascar hissing cockroach. We compared the success rate of gap negotiation between the cyborg with mounted board and implanted board and found the latter outperformed the former. We demonstrated our cyborg cockroach with implanted board could follow faithfully to the locomotion command via antennal or cercal stimulation and traverse a narrow gap like air vent cover. In contrast to the conventional arrangement, our cyborg insects are suitable for application in a concealed environment.

Navigating multi-robot systems in complex terrains has always been a challenging task. This is due to the inherent limitations of traditional robots in collision avoidance, adaptation to unknown environments, and sustained energy efficiency. In order to overcome these limitations, this research proposes a solution by integrating living insects with miniature electronic controllers to enable robotic-like programmable control, and proposing a novel control algorithm for swarming. Although these creatures, called cyborg insects, have the ability to instinctively avoid collisions with neighbors and obstacles while adapting to complex terrains, there is a lack of literature on the control of multi-cyborg systems. This research gap is due to the difficulty in coordinating the movements of a cyborg system under the presence of insects' inherent individual variability in their reactions to control input. In response to this issue, we propose a novel swarm navigation algorithm addressing these challenges. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated through an experimental validation in which a cyborg swarm was successfully navigated through an unknown sandy field with obstacles and hills. This research contributes to the domain of swarm robotics and showcases the potential of integrating biological organisms with robotics and control theory to create more intelligent autonomous systems with real-world applications.

By leveraging their high mobility and small size, insects have been combined with microcontrollers to build up cyborg insects for various practical applications. Unfortunately, all current cyborg insects rely on implanted electrodes to control their movement, which causes irreversible damage to their organs and muscles. Here, we develop a non-invasive method for cyborg insects to address above issues, using a conformal electrode with an in-situ polymerized ion-conducting layer and an electron-conducting layer. The neural and locomotion responses to the electrical inductions verify the efficient communication between insects and controllers by the non-invasive method. The precise "S" line following of the cyborg insect further demonstrates its potential in practical navigation. The conformal non-invasive electrodes keep the intactness of the insects used while controlling their motion. With the antennae, important olfactory organs of insects preserved, the cyborg insect, in the future, may be endowed with abilities to detect the surrounding environment.

While bio-inspired and biomimetic systems draw inspiration from living materials, biohybrid systems incorporate them with synthetic devices, allowing the exploitation of both organic and artificial advantages inside a single entity. In the challenging development of centimeter-scaled mobile robots serving unstructured territory navigations, biohybrid systems appear as a potential solution in the forms of terrestrial insect-machine hybrid systems, which are the fusion of living ambulatory insects and miniature electronic devices. Although their maneuver can be deliberately controlled via artificial electrical stimulation, these hybrid systems still inherit the insects' outstanding locomotory skills, orchestrated by a sophisticated central nervous system and various sensory organs, favoring their maneuvers in complex terrains. However, efficient autonomous navigation of these hybrid systems is challenging. The struggle to optimize the stimulation parameters for individual insects limits the reliability and accuracy of navigation control. This study overcomes this problem by implementing a feedback control system with an insight view of tunable navigation control for an insectmachine hybrid system based on a living darkling beetle. Via a thrust controller for acceleration and a proportional controller for turning, the system regulates the stimulation parameters based on the instantaneous status of the hybrid robot. While the system can provide an overall success rate of ~71% for path-following navigations, fine-tuning its control parameters could further improve the outcome's reliability and precision to up to ~94% success rate and ~1/2 body length accuracy, respectively. Such tunable performance of the feedback control system provides flexibility to navigation applications of insect-machine hybrid systems. Keywords Biohybrid systems; Insect-machine hybrid systems; Zophobas morio; Autonomous navigation; Feedback control; Path-following 1. Introduction Terrestrial insect-scale mobile robots have become prominent candidates for post-disaster search-and-rescue missions. Their tiny size and light weight would help them easily penetrate deep into the rubbles of collapsed buildings without causing additional collapses. While there are growing efforts to achieve insect-level autonomy in these robots, it is still a challenge to match their natural-born counterparts, i.e., living ambulatory insects. While control autonomy was achieved in various insect-scale mobile robots (Chen et al. 2020; de Rivaz et al. 2018; Goldberg et al. 2018; St. Pierre and Bergbreiter 2019; Yang et al. 2020), power autonomy was demonstrated only in a few platforms, like HAMR-F (Goldberg et al. 2018) or Robeetle (Yang et al. 2020). Furthermore, although inverted and vertical climbing was demonstrated (Chen et al. 2020; de Rivaz et al. 2018), maneuvering across complex terrains is still a conundrum for these artificial robots.

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.

A 750,000 grant will enable several engineers to employ the super-sensitive sense of smell in locusts to construct a bio-robotic nose of sorts. The problem is that biological systems possess a level of complexity that cannot be reached by their AI counterparts. While the sense of olfaction is a pretty primitive one, it extends across the board in all species. It is almost as if the field of biology made extra room for sensing chemicals in the air in order to warn the species of any danger or prey in the locality. A thorough understanding of the olfactory sense is very crucial for artificial intelligence.