Russia Creates Cockroach Size Surveillance Robot

Russian scientists at Immanuel Kant Baltic University has unveiled a cockroach sized robot which can spy and find people trapped under debris.

The scientists developed the unique robot on behalf of a company, whose name has not yet been disclosed. The company expected a robot which appears and behaves like living cockroach and be of exact size.

This was the challenging project for scientists as balance is needed among these three requirements, the project’s head engineer, Aleksey Belousov was quoted as saying by various Russian media today.

“For example Berkeley University has been working on their cockroach for the past four years, but they didn’t have to make it look like an insect, so it’s faster than ours. But it can’t turn at speed and it doesn’t look like a real cockroach at all,  Belousov added.

The company had also told us to create robot on time and within the budget, Belousov added.

“We had to develop many things from scratch. For example there’s a company in Austria that produces gearing for legs, but a unit for one robot would have cost us near US$9,000 while our whole budget is US$22,500,” said the university’s leading engineer, Danil Borchevkin.

The robot is about 10cm long, moves with a speed of up to 30cm per second that is one-third the speed of a real cockroach. Further, It is equipped with light sensors, contact and non-contact probes that allow it to move without bumping into things.