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Vehicle for Cockroaches
William Robinson wrote to mention an entertaining Wired news article about vehicle meant for cockroaches. From the article: "Hertz has constructed a three-wheeled robotic vehicle that lets a Madagascan hissing cockroach navigate a room while perched atop a ping-pong ball. The ball works like a computer mouse's track ball. Where the roach moves on the ball, the vehicle moves in the room.
Sensors on the bot can tell when it's going to hit something. It also has a semi-circle of LED lights facing the roach, so when it's about to hit an obstacle an LED will shine on the creature from the direction of the barrier, hopefully causing it to run in the other direction."
Oh wow! This is just like the one reported by G4TV/TechTV, Gizmodo, Engadget, every other blog and website and news outlet AND AND SLASHDOT (Cockroach-Controlled Robot)... SIX WEEKS AGO.
Way to stay on top of things, Wired and Slashdot!
Submitter... Editor... is it that fucking hard to punch the word "roach" into the search field before posting? I mean, the duplicate article is the FIRST FUCKING RESULT.
Cockroaches and dupes.
Cockroach-Controlled Robot
That's pretty sick.
or did they just copy the design from before?
Am I the only guy who read the blurb and couldn't help but blurt out: "What the fuck is Hertz doing working on a rent-a-ping-pong-ball...for roaches?!"
It was like living in a Ziggy strip, I swear to God.
...Innovation is slowing down. HA! Take that Jonathan Huebner!
first post?
Veritas patesco per quaestio questio. Truth is revealed through questions.
If you are going to duplicate articles, duplicate articles, about, say, finding water on the moon, or Debian releasing a stable distro, or, people find a cure for cancer, or SCO finally going belly up.
Why subject us to the thought of ROBOTICALLY AMPLIFIED COCKROACHES twice? Or is this just for everyone whose mind blanked this out the first time?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
While I definately have to geek a little on this and applaud the work of people to create micro vehicles... I have to wonder the usefulness of cockroaches... I mean, isn't there enough things to research - without having to break out the need for transportation for house vermin?
But from the purely technical aspects of it - it's amazing... a trackball driven vehicle, designed for cockroaches. A for creativity.... C- for relativity...
There's an article about this in the most recent issue of "Make" magazine, the magazine put out by O'Reilly. It has a neat picture of the cockroach up close with the velcro that's cemented to its back. Very neat.
Wouldn't THAT look weird on your kitchen floor.
*scatter*.
They're gonna be the ones surviving the nuclear wars anyway, so might as well teach them how to use the technology while we can.
*DrugCheese rants*
What happens when this new cockroach vehicle becomes more popular? What if I find cockroach hummers and cockroach minivans? And, by any chance, could these be modified hotwheels cars? I am afraid this will make the job of exterminators much harder.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
Between continued dupe-a-mania and the thought going through my mind of the bugs from Joe's Apartment getting their own pimped out rides, I think I've had enough for one night. Good night /.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Vehicle for Cockroaches? Subject line says it all.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Roach Coach.
Yet my Open Source Flea Circus Java Spyware Toolbar Firefox Extension article submission was rejected AGAIN!?
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
If they can just get them to use cellphones while they drive it might be a great way to wipe out cockroaches. Darwin would be proud.
Let's teach some insects how to OPERATE MECHA! That seems like a good plan. Once we have the driving the little ones around we'll go ahead and give them the three story tall robots with weapons.
As if fighting off the cockroach hoardes isn't going to be tough enough in the future.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
if the robots ever got caught in those sticky traps.
I'd have the terrible urge to smash his invention with a rolled up newspaper.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Well, I for one welcome our newly mobilized Cockroach overlords
"when it's about to hit an obstacle an LED will shine on the creature from the direction of the barrier, hopefully causing it to run in the other direction."
In other words, the perfect antidote to politicians, and GuardedNet executives.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Is it such a slow news day that they have to repeat stories? About cockroaches, no less.
Who says innovation is dead when such wonderful inventions like the cockroach car are being created by the world's best and brightest....
So nice that the quality of life for cockroaches is getting better. Too bad that the quality of life for humans is not getting any better.
Who says innovation is getting slower?
And people dare claim innovation is getting slower.
Next thing you know, we'll be giving squad cars to the spiders to keep those speed demon roaches in check...
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
would you smoke me? zulu corridor
Seriously, don't we learn anything from old cartoons?
Animals do learn, and these are ones that are already remarkably durable. Is anyone doing this experiment asking whether this is a good idea?
I'm actually relative serious when I say: I hope they're disposing of the test subjects afterward and not sending them back to the hive to say: "I figured out the rosetta stone to their technology. Now we'll have no trouble taking over."
I recently re-watched the original Jurassic Park and was properly impacted by someone's remark at some point that they'd be safe from the Raptors untilt hey figured out how to turn a doorknob. It was an excellent point about intelligent creatures. I'm actually not worried a bug is going to drive a car, but I do worry that Einstein's remark "a mind one stretched by a new idea never regains its original shape" might have some applicability here if we make a regular practice of this kind of thing.
We don't need to be artificially creating triggers that put roaches into a more advanced intellectual state ahead of their own natural evolution.
Star Trek teaches us the Prime Directive, which says approximately: don't interfere with the evolution of lower life forms because they may not have the wisdom to use their newfound knowledge for the betterment of mankind. I say we follow that lead in this case.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
1. Insert generic and superfluous statement regarding dislike of dupe'd articles
2. Make obvious reference to previous story
3. Welcome our newly mobile cockroach overlords
4. ????
5. Profit!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
... La Cucaracha for the horn?
This has been already published here...
What's the point? To fill Slashdot with duplicated garbage all the time? Shame on you!
I intend to capitalize on the upcoming roach motorist boom and have started my own auto-insurance firm, dedicated to serving the needs of our squishy mobile friends.
Accepted forms of payment are RoachPal, MasterDung Cards, and The Madagascar Express Card ("Don't leave roach droppings without it!")
We are currently accepting new investors.
Robert Oschler - RobotsRule.com
Is a way to give editors bad karma...
I have freaks! I did something right...
I live in Japan. My wife's car beeps when you put it into reverse. Not outside the car, mind you, where it might warn a luckless pedestrian (tm). INSIDE THE CAR ONLY. Perhaps the roach's semi-sircle of LEDs could be added to my wif's car, and we could give the roach a backing beeper.
We'll submit it to the IEEE then post on
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
How about some natural sunlight to make slashdotters move around to different areas of their mothers' basements?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Good luck debugging this thing!
Instead of brains, the roaches have ganglia: clumps of nerve cells on various parts of their bodies.
...
"It was kind of a no-brainer that (Hertz's bot) would be a piece we would include..."
Zing!
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/ 21/1818241&from=rss
is the original post
That's sad, really. It must suck to be you.
Innovation Getting Slower?
Vehicle for Cockroaches
This is a great step forward in re-abilitating the handicapped cockroach and enabling him to regain his place as a useful, contributing member of society!
Non tam praeclarum est scire Latine, quam turpe nescire
-- Cicero
That would probably result in some GTA-like action.
I can see it now, roaches selling drugs, roaches in drive-by's.
In soviet russia roach exterminates YOU.
Those damn things are already immortal. Now they're teaching them how to use machines. Soon they'll be able to develop their own technology and then we'll be their livestock. They'll make us cook for them, and they'll only let us eat food they've already walked on, and then we'll have to fight each other in arenas for their amusement. It's so fucking disgusting.
That's a great idea for a new FPS right there! I hereby licence this concept under the Creative Commons licence, which I've never read but can't be too bad.
I guess it is an art project and not a science project but still...the bot seems to be completely superfluous as the cockroach is not even given the slightest indication that its actions are controlling the bot. The cockroach either changes direction when facing a light or not. Wooo. The idea that actions affect outcome is a much different proposition than using goal directed actions to pertain a particular outcome.
So I'm forced to disagree with Hertz -- this system is far less interesting than a computer.
hey man, it got switches n' dubs. I got julio to do a mural of my girl on the hood, she was a bitch tho, everytime the fridge light would come on, man, she would run!
Sigh.
Start a happiness pandemic
Oh great now there is going to be a bunch of fan and lazy ass cockroaches.
The fireman in me wants to see the crash test results. Does it have airbags?
Because that would be awesome. Just imagine. I could finally fulfill my lifelong dream of unleashing a freakin army of cockroach piloted helicopters with freakin lasers. One billion dollars never seemed so close and so far away than it does right now.
zosxavius photography
Maybe I'm retarded, but isn't this a "vehicle" in the same way that the Flinstone car is a vehicle? I mean, the roach still has to walk anyway. What does this research actually teach us? I'm willing to be the antennae were working better for the roach than the LED idea. If someone shined an LED into my eyes while I was driving, I'd probably slam right the fuck into the thing that I was supposed to be avoiding.
They're going to be driving our ping pong balls!
We keep trying to kill the little (or if you are in the tropics Cadillac-sized) buggers with various chemicals. How hard is it going to be when they can just flip on the A/C in the Roach-Coach and motor comfortably accross the kitchen floor? Damned things won't even scatter when you turn the light on either; just flip the sun visor down.
No one of consequence
This reminds me a little bit of the pigeon guided missile, a project that the noted behaviorist B.F. Skinner worked on during World War II.
e
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_guided_missil
During World War 2, Project Pigeon was American behaviourist B. F. Skinner's attempt to develop a pigeon-guided missile.
The control system involved a lens at the front of the missile projecting an image of the target to a screen inside, while a pigeon trained (by operant conditioning) to recognise the target pecked at it. As long as the pecks remained in the center of the screen, the missile would fly straight, but pecks off-center would cause the screen to tilt, which would then, via a connection to the missile's flight controls, cause the missile to change course.
Although skeptical of the idea, the National Defense Research Committee nevertheless contributed $25,000 to the research. However, Skinner's plans to use pigeons in Pelican missiles was apparently too radical for the military establishment; although he had some success with the training, he could not get his idea taken seriously.
First muscle cars, then SUVs, now roach coaches....the poor planet
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
Yet another slashdot dupe...
that lawyers drove BMW's, Benz, and other high priced cars?
...This is definetively what he would spend his spare time on researching.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
has anyone pondered the possibility of rating the manuevering ability of these cockroaches, then breeding the more "successful" drivers?
1) devise a way to map the cockroaches motor/neural/ganglia structure.
if the offspring prove just as well at piloting or better, many many generations later, one could compare the differences of the them to determine what makes them better drivers.
2) forget about the ganglia and just clone cockroach pilots and sell them and their cars as pets
3) profit!!!
welcome our ping pong ball riding cockroach overloards.
My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch.
Or, "The Land that Time Forgot"...
I can see a whole new series of cartoons, except Chaka will be recast as a "ChakaRoach".
Imagine if your next Rental from Hertz ad shows cockroach-powered cars.
I wonder how they'll measure horsepower; "CREHP" (Cock-Roach Equivalent HorsePower). Maybe CRP or RP: RoachPower.
So, next Toyota and their new subsidiary GM will figure how to run electrons under the roach wings, into that green/white puss-pack stickin' out the back end of female roaches' ass, and then into the brain of the roaches and cockroaches and put them on a neural net so they turn or screech or whatever all in unison. Maybe cockroaches will be a new fangled crystal timer clock. Maybe that crystallin' screamin' will excite some isotopes to incite the wheels of a vehicle to turn...
Hell, for that matter, we'll eventually have Roach Clocks instead of full-fledged Atomic Clocks. You'll know when your Roach Clock can no longer rock around the clock... the crystal will be green and display a few feathered legs stuck on one of the glow-in-the-dark minute markers...
Might create new terminology for some sex-depraved nerds and engineers and spawn a series of new jokes, especially if Intel has to learn to tune Cock (roaches) to CPUs (angle of the dangle, pico farad, etc...). Yech...
Maybe a helmet full of of cockroaches snapped onto the heads of a few movie producers and movie execs might inspire innovation in a new line of cinema scripts to reinvigorate the movie house receipts...
"Coming (that is, "Crawlin'") to a theatre NEAR YOU: "Chaka and the ChakRoaches", the battle between Saturday AM Proto Re-run Man and the Enduring-Nascent/Ascendant Roach Beings" (our new crawling, umm, overlords...)
Then, when Hertz and Avis and Budget have their CREHP wars (before the nuke wars ensue), one of them can bust out with the PussyCat Dolls' song "Don't Cha" (and do some rhymez with Busta Rhymes) with:
"Don't Cha wish ya had KokROACH lak mee?
Don't Cha wish yah had a kokROACK lyke MEE?
Don't Cha?
Don't Cha?...
I know da feeh-len!
I know dat feeh-lun!
And ah hear da screelin'
I hear dat screelun'
Clip-cloppin' HORses out-torqued
By ROAches in MAH street-machine..."
Now, to start the perv-nerds off on the right leg, umm, foot:
Would it be "cock(roach) blocking to hyper-irradiate those cockroachs? Or would it be cock-blockin' if you put a few popsicle sticks or kindergarten letter blocks in the roaches' path? Or, would that be legal "En-Croach-Ment"
omg, even i can remember the first time this story was here. the first time round, the writer directly to the scientists website that actually had some interesting informatin on the subject...
With a name like Hertz, he was bound to invent something great.
Too bad the unit hertz is already taken. if it wasnt, in future instead of being a unit of frequency, it might be a unit of distance defined by how far a cockroach can pilot a threewheeled vehicle in 1 minute.
Soon he will be hiring these vehicles to roaches. He could even start a business and call it Hertz or something.
You have not seen the last of Kim Jong Il!!
Now we just need a version that works with humans, and we can really change the world.
Cockroaches eat you. .Sorry.
- Moomin
"Slashdot Editors"
And why are you paying to subscribe to such a site? It just validates their behavior.
Also, is it so hard for editors to actually edit the submissions? There is an obvious sentence fragment in the summary. It makes this site look like it was run by retarded high school dropouts.
...it's called an SUV!
So, English is a second language, huh?
sure it's a dupe story..but I didn't know because I don't see EVERY SINGLE STORY slashdot runs.
Mod parent left.
That'sssssssssss right dumbassssssssssss... give me ssssssssssssome better mobility - muhahahahahaha! I'll play niccccccccce and sssssssstupid while the lightsssssssss are on, but asssssssss sssssssssoon asssssssss they go out, my assssss is down the ssssssstreeet...muhahaa...muhaa....muhahhhahahahah a!!!
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
In Florida the cockroaches are big. They drive vans.
Whoever invented that......needs to get a girlfriend.
How do you feel now, having all that work fall flat?
We don't need to be artificially creating triggers that put roaches into a more advanced intellectual state ahead of their own natural evolution.
You seem to be falling for the ID crap. Evolution itself does not exist, it is just a concept. Evolution is not some godlike entity. Therefore it can not have any purpose, like a 'god' could have. That also means there is no 'natural evolution.' Stuff just happens. What happens to one species does always influence other species in its environment. So if mankind decides it would be a nice idea to put cockroaches in robots, then good luck on the roaches. It does not, however, change the roaches in any way.
Maybe that happens when somebody starts to breed roaches selectively. But that happened for thousands of years with lifestock and has not rendered any chicken overlords yet. (Cue jokes about some dumb president)
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
http://artbots.org/2005/participants/Cockroachcont rolled/
wow isnt this news worthy, can I go to sleep now?
lick the cancle button (at least thats what our Chinese QA says)
Their relatively large size make them easier to work with than other types of roaches, and their tendency to hiss when they are upset lets him know if it's time to give one a break
And we all know, of course, this is how many horror films begin, right?
ROFL
-- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
The lines for driver's licenses at the DMV are about to get a whole lot longer. Thanks a lot!
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
As if it's not hard enough to kill the stinking things already, now we have to contend with them running away on motorized carts!
How long before some smart roach drops a Hemi in one of these things and REALLY outruns us?
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
Exterminate...exterminate!
Commercials for how Geico can save you up to 15 percent on your family's 6-legged drivers too.
Erated
Aim: To test the reader loyalty to slashdot. And or its method of business.
Method: Send in a dupe (A particularly noticeable one) and see if people remember and comment about it. Analyse the response for status and modify system accordingly.
Benefits: Yeilds a very good idea about reader loyalty trends.
Risks: Disgruntled users get bored and move over to other Discussion forums.
This will clear the way for GTA New York City.
When can you recognize a slashdotzeimer?
./ readers know don't forget the point of Godwin
- When admins post more than 2 dups week (3 last week)
- When readers have too much, too often posts to read and forget it's a dup or when the they start a new post-war about dups, and so, trolling the dup of yesterday?
The posts feeds are getting shorter, it should mean that
I'm going to be hissed at in Cockroach-ess by the passing 'motorists' instead of hearing obscenities?
[Now, I'm off to lift my le... Um, visit... at another place.]