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Robots to Rid Us of Cockroaches?
unassimilatible writes "It behaves like a cockroach. It smells like a cockroach. It is accepted by other cockroaches. But it is not a cockroach. It is a robot and scientists say its invention is a breakthrough in mankind's struggle to control the animal kingdom. The Sunday Times is reporting on a cool form of robotics, impersonating (inanimalnating?) animals. Leurre is a project on building and controlling mixed societies composed of animals and artificial agents. Within a decade, its inventors believe, it will be leading the unwanted pests out of dark kitchen corners, to where they can be eliminated. Additionally, they say they will soon be using robots to stop sheep jumping off cliffs and to encourage chickens to take exercise. Schematics, tools, and pictures here. Apparently, cockroaches do not wear tinfoil hats, as they are not smart enough to be suspicious of box-shaped circuit boards with an antennae sticking out."
...news...
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My big point, though; the site provides specs, images, everything one might need to actually build one; I wonder how complicated it would be..
Informatus Technologicus
"I for one welcome our transistor festoned friends".
Seriously, another use for Duct tape.
A/K/A/ household hint #444.
If you lay duct tape around the perimeter of a room before retiring, any cockroaches who attempt to cross will become attached to the aDuct tape and are easily disposed of in the morning.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
That's a great idea, but might I suggest a slight modification.
Instead of poking holes into a perfectly good lid, why don't you lay thin wires across the opening of the jar and run a small current across it. That way, once they try to enter the jar, they get zapped!
It works! I have a fly swatter that has metal wires in place of the swatter which works the same way.
Same principle, but on a jar. The bonus is that every time a fly lands, you are treated to a sound and light show!
Live forever, or die trying.
For ideas on how to get rid of un-wanted fruit flies see what people who grow them for a living do here
Another variation is just a glass with a piece of printer paper in it rolled into a cone/funnel. Apple works too.
I was called out of town to a funeral unexpectedly last summer and left a whole bunch of fruit out (it was the last thing that crossed my mind). When I returned home, I literally had CLOUDS of fruit flies in my apartment. I put a few of those scattered around, and within a few days they were all gone. I had to take the glass outside to release them, but at least they weren't in my house anymore.
Well, you can always count on the minds of the Japanese to already have come up with an anime about bug killing robots....
Ichigeki Sacchuu!! Hoihoi-san (a.k.a. One-Shot Bug Killer!! Interceptor Doll Hoihoi-san)
http://www.tenshi-no-tsubasa.com/
--Chris ^_^
I used to work for a mosquito control company. While the place was pretty low-tech, we were apparently advanced enough that WHO was looking at us for ideas for THEIR program.
heh.
We keep trying to use chemicals to control animals. The potential for genetic manipulation is much more powerful. Animals rapidly evolve resistance to things that kill them outright. But since male mosquitos don't bite (only females) and breeding and releasing male mosquitos doesn't pose a health risk imagine if we bread mosquitos for the following characteristics and then only released the male varieties (sex could be altered by viruses, as currently happens in nature)
1. Mosquitos which prefer nectar to animals. Couple this with poorer versions of the genes which sense CO2 and heat.
2. Breed mosquitos to avoid the human scent. You could do this by exposing mosquitos to a scent with a food source, and killing those which migrated towards it first. Instead of selling mosquito repellants, breed mosquitos which are naturally repeled by people.
3. Perfect viruses which alter the mosquito's sex, making all mosquitos male. It could be distributed in the same way that BT toxin is currently used, and could be made not to jump species barriers. ( I know of worries with calissa virus etc. but those were mammals. These are cold blooded insects )
4. Use devices to interfere with mosquito's mating communication - chemicals, sounds, etc. Like those bug zappers. They can be targeted to mosquitos sufficiently that they wouldn't hurt people.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Only the poor have roaches in the south. The rich have "Palmetto bugs"
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Depending on where you live, the roaches may not be naturally occuring. If you live in North America the roaches are a foreign species (there's a reason why it's called a 'German cockroach'). Eliminating them isn't going to upset any natural food chains, as they're a near exclusive parasite that's hitched itself to humans.
If it wasn't for the fact that we try to kill them on a regular basis, they might be considered pets.
Why bother leading them out? Just kill the roaches, then eat their bodies for fuel please. There's a good robot.
Actually, government derives power by having the problem, not by solving the problem. With government in charge, no problem is ever solved.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
This is (as modded) funny, but not (also as modded) "insightful:" fences can be costly (in at least time and effort, if not sheer quantity of materials) and impractical. That's one reason people use herding dogs. These little robots can become commodities--cheaper than raising and training a pup to herd. They might also be programmed or deployed to be better herders and/or may have a longer active lifetime.
Actually, you'd be amazed at how high sheep can jump. I've seen one clear a 4-foot fence just to eat a piece of grass, then jump back over. So you'd need something moderately tall, which could cost quite a bit depending on the area being covered.
My son and I were thinking along the lines of a robot to fight fire ants. We thought something like a micro-terminator would be cool.
Then we realized that if it was remotely controllable via wireless connection from your computer, with a camera built in, you could virtually fight the fire ants yourself. Instant coolest video game around.
BUT! What if you had a LAN party, and you and friends (or competitors, whatever) had a whole squad or platoon of these guys in the fire ant mound?
If someone does this, they will get filthy rich. (If you do it, I'd like a little credit for the idea, and maybe a tiny %, or maybe a job there. 8^)
The robots can look and work any way you want, so long as on the screen they look and respond like the character you choose (Terminator, Werewolf, Atom Ant, whatever), and they actually kill the ants.
And, of course, if you just wanted the robot to do the work, the computer could run the program for you.
You could use this for any sort of pest - ants, roaches, termites, mice, spiders, snakes, rats, weiner dogs, smug cats, drug dealers, you name it.
I haven't found a new video game I really, really like in well over 10 years, but I would buy Fire Ant Terminator in a heartbeat! And I'd think really hard about springing for the "Vicious Stray Animal Bot", too.
Anyway: Found this.
Apparently, "getting lucky" for a cockroach really is getting lucky.
That's about how I do it... go to a party, get smashed, and run into things...
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
When she was in technical college, one of my old girlfriends used to hang out with a couple of our fellow students who lived in a big, dirty, old, run-down apartment block that was absolutely infested with cockroaches.
Well, one day the microwave stopped working. This was a blow to these poor popcorn-fed students. Since they knew what Ohm's Law was and could identify a capacitor from a resistor, they decided to open the microwave up and fix it themselves.
They were not prepared for what they saw: All the open spaces inside the microwave where choked with cockroaches. Some were dead. Some were alive.
Worst of all, some cockroaches were three times larger than any of the openings they could find.
Although it's possible that they grew this big because of the relative safety and ample supply of dead cockroaches for food, I like to think that the radiation addled their DNA somehow.