SKIRMISHER

Remember last year when we mentioned “Robo-roach,” a European match-boxed sized robotic thingie that smelled of cockroach but looked like a toy? Turns out its goals — fooling real, live insects into thinking it’s one of them, then proceed in influencing their behavior — have been recently met.

The robot doesn’t look anything like a cockroach to human eyes.

“It looks like an electronic matchbox,” said Jose Halloy, a researcher at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. But that doesn’t matter, he says, “because in fact it has to look like a cockroach from a cockroach perspective.”

Basically, it has to smell like a cockroach. The scientists coat the boxy robots with a chemical, a cockroach smell, so the real roaches won’t run away.

“The cockroaches are not at all stressed by the robots because they are perceived as cockroaches,” Halloy said. “So the cockroach is just accepting that kind of strange buddy. And that’s the start of the game.”

…

When they put these robots in with the living roaches, they all began to interact. Before long, the robots and cockroaches were huddled together under the same roof. “The robots and the cockroaches behave as a group,” Halloy said.

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