Cockroaches Provide Blueprint for Robotic First Responder

A University of California at Berkeley research team developing robots for search and rescue missions has found inspiration from the cockroach.

Kaushik Jayaram and Robert Full have constructed a robot that can also compress itself by more than half to fit through narrow spaces, aided by a low-friction shell. Its development has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

By constructing a special obstacle course, the researchers found that an American cockroach could slip through a space smaller than a quarter of its standing body height in less than a second and withstand forces of around 900 times its own weight without sustaining injury. A cockroach is able to compress its exoskeleton to around half its original size in order to achieve these feats.

The cockroach could also move at 20 body lengths a second and also use a little understood form of locomotion called “body-friction-legged crawling” when moving in confined spaces.

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