Creep-tastic cockroach robot refuses to be squished - CNET

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There are cute robots. There are helpful robots. There are unhelpful robots.

And then there's one that will elicit a shriek because it's a mechanical version of a cockroach.

The cockroach may sound like an unpleasant inspiration for a robot. But consider its charms: The insect is small, fast, tough and capable of squeezing into tight places.

A research team at the University of Califoia at Berkeley put real roaches through an obstacle course to lea how they slink through cracks. It tus out that cockroaches stick their legs out to the side and compress their bodies to the height of a couple pennies. The study also found that cockroaches can withstand being crushed by 900 times their body weight and live to tell the tale.

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Berkeley integrative biology student Kaushik Jayaram (now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard) took this cockroach knowledge and built an inexpensive robot capable of splaying its legs and lowering its body. It even has a bug-inspired plastic shell that makes it look like a cross between a cockroach and a pill bug.