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."

Comments

Wow....

[raydobbs]

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...

Violating the Prime Directive

[NetSettler]

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.

What they need...

[jpardey]

Is a way to give editors bad karma...

Re:What they need...

[DamienNightbane]

Personally, I'd rather see the ability to mod posts stupid first. There are alot of worthless posts out there that are just plain stupid or incorrect rather than offtopic, overrated, troll, or flamebait.

CONVERGENCE

[haakondahl]

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.

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 /. to celebrate our standards-based convergence.

Re:Duperlicious!

[ryanov]

Zonk is really on top of his game lately.