Continuing on the theme of insect controlled robots, we have the Cockroach-run robot created by Garnet Hertz.

Link: Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot

There is a ton of information and multimedia content on the site, so check it out. The author’s has some interesting comments under the heading Why are you doing this project?. One that stuck out for me:

It is okay for highly technological systems to be novel. As a matter of fact, it’s better to build a novel system and admit that it’s absurd – as opposed to doing interesting research and framing it as “scientific” post-facto. It is my opinion that much of scientific discovery occurs in “non-scientific” methods: it’s more of a creative process than one might imagine, and is often constructed to appear methodological as the paper is being written up for publication. Take a look at current research funded by the Defense Sciences Office of DARPA: despite appearances of being utilitarian, it’s littered with projects (with large budgets) appearing more “novel” than this.

Right on! Now we need to get the cockroach bot to fight the moth bot.