Mechanical engineers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have devised a method for enabling a robotic arm to autonomously assemble cyborg cockroaches — essentially teaching the robot to merge electronics to live insects.

The team based their work on earlier research that demonstrated the potential for connecting electronics to live insects like cockroaches to remotely control their behavior without harming them. Because connecting such technology — usually in the form of a small backpack that houses communication and electrical processing, and probes for stimulating the insect — takes roughly 30 minutes when done manually and requires patience and dexterity, the team sought to automate the process.

Insect-computer hybrid robot and its automatic assembly setup. Source: arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2411.13164

As such, the team developed an autonomous approach for assembling these cyborgs that takes a fraction of the time.

To accomplish this, the cockroaches are first put to sleep with carbon dioxide and then placed on a platform where they are automatically pinned down with metal rods, while leaving the necessary body parts exposed.

Meanwhile, a preprogrammed computer vision system identifies where the electronics need to be placed and that information is fed to the robotic arm, which has been trained to pick up the electronics needed and attach them to the insect. Once the cockroach has been outfitted, the pins on the platform will retract and the cyborg insect is set free.

This process, the researchers reported, took approximately 68 seconds to assemble each cyborg cockroach, which reportedly worked just as well as those that were hand assembled.

An article detailing the technology, “Cyborg Insect Factory: Automatic Assembly System to Build up Insect-computer Hybrid Robot Based on Vision-guided Robotic Arm Manipulation of Custom Bipolar Electrodes,” appears in the journal arXiv.