Two decades after DARPA first started playing around with cyborg insects in its HI-MEMS program, a team of Singaporean researchers is showing off the latest accomplishment in the area. The productive researchers are proudly presenting their potent new 3D-printed variant: a remote-controlled, cyborg cockroach equipped with IR cameras that can breathe underwater for hours on end.
Although that description sounds like the start of a sci-fi or horror movie, the team led by Hirotaka Sato at Nanyang Technological University has been working with the much-hated pest for a good while, outfitting them with infrared cameras in a bid to help rescue operations by steering the roaches in disaster areas to find survivors. To be clear, as the release notes, Cyborg insects are living insects that have been retrofitted with technology. Sato's team had already demonstrated an orchestrated swarm of the little beasties in 2024, but reportedly wasn't happy with the fact that they couldn't send them through water, and went back to the drawing board to fix that.
