bugs

"To explore how groups of cockroaches make collective decisions, scientists have created a robotic cockroach that the real insects accept as one of their own. 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."