In a breakthrough for the battle against mankind's most diehard enemy -- the cockroach -- scientists have hoodwinked a group of them into congregating in a place where they can be stamped on easily.
The kick in the mandibles comes from a Belgian-led team which spent three years developing a mini robot that can convince cockroaches to creep out of dark holes and gather in light places. The InsBot looks more like a pencil sharpener than a household pest, but it smells like a cockroach. Most importantly, the InsBot can pass for a Periplaneta Americana (American cockroach).
Jean-Louis Deneubourg, director of the social ecology laboratory at Universite Libre de Bruxelles, says the success of the 3 million euro(US$3.75 million) EU-funded experiment has ramifications for more than just pest control.
"We know very little about how decentralized communities of beings, like cockroaches or ants, reach collective decisions," Deneubourg said.
The InsBot has a cocktail of pheromones and molecules painted on its body, allowing it to infiltrate the cockroach community.
Experiments have shown that cockroaches are highly sociable creatures.
"If you're out with a group of friends and you need to choose between two pubs that offer roughly the same advantages, you're in the same position as a group of 20 cockroaches choosing between two identical holes," he said.
"Each cockroach, including the InsBot, has the same degree of influence. But we found that if the InsBot went to one hole and stayed there for 10 or 15 seconds, it would soon be joined by another roach. The longer the two roaches stayed in the hole, the more chance there was of them being joined by others," Deneubourg said.
He says the research project could ultimately be expanded to help sheep farmers whose herds have a costly tendency to jump off cliffs in large numbers just because one of them has done so while escaping a predator.
But, for now, Deneubourg is not taking his eye off cockroaches which he describes as "no dirtier than flies" and victims of a "bad press." He believes it will soon be possible to develop an "intelligent roach nest" in which robots are positioned to tease the creepy-crawlies into human stamping range.
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