In today's technology, robots can save lives. Robots come in all shapes and sizes and it wouldn't be a strange thing if the tech that saves your life looks like a cockroach.
Cockroaches have ultimately survived several natural and earthly disasters. The creepy crawlies have lived through the ice age and survived our insect sprays. It's no wonder scientists look to them for insipiration. They are described online as virtually un-killable.
So instead of stepping on them, people are now learning from them. In recent studies conducted by a team at the University of California, Berkeley, the cockroach is able to withstand pressure of up to 900x its body weight and can creep in spaces that are up to 60% smaller than its normal body size while still moving at super high speeds of up to 20x its body length per second - like a microscopic superfast shrinker, one can say. That explains why they can appear in weird places like the cracks between tiles and shock you in the middle of the night. These are the reasons why the cockroach survived.
Dr. Kaushik Jayaram and his team of UC Berkeley researchers saw these characteristics to be useful for mankind. They are trying to mimic these benefits in a search and rescue kind of robot that can squeeze into tight spaces in times of extreme disasters - such as an earthquake that collapsed a building on a group of people. They published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.
This kind of technology is beneficial for disaster prone areas and even during worst case scenarios of an attack. They built an origami style robot they call "CRAM" or a compressible robot with articulated mechanisms. It sort of looks like a robot with its segmented features and flexible shell. It can also move like a cockroach, bending its spine to roll forward and crawl like the insect. Their compression abilities are extremely useful for the century.
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