Roaches are simply annoying and scary looking for some people. Have you ever thought of a brutal slaughtering of roaches in a big group, so you can get rid of them once for all from your living space? If you wanna do such a nasty killing of roaches, you’ll need to find a way to gather them at a place and then kill all of them at once. So sorry that I have such a brutal thought in my mind. Of course, gathering roaches is simply no easy task, as roaches are cowards. Once you lay your hands, they’ll have fight for their ways out to run away from you.
Anyway, lets put aside this brutal idea of killing roaches. But, if you’re interested in studying the behavior of roaches more deeply, there would be an easy way to gather them together even at a place that light is present. Jose Halloy and some colleagues at the Free University of Brussels have created some tiny robots that act like Pied Papers that can trick cockroaches into following them. And these tiny robots can even gather roaches in a brightly lid area, which roaches hate most. The intention of these tiny cockroach-luring robots was to understand how roaches make decisions, of course it wasn’t for my nasty idea of slaughtering roaches in big groups.
According to the study, roaches generally act as a group, much like ants. Roaches like to gather in crowds, of course in dark area. The experiment consists of two stages. First, the little robots were programmed to carry scent of roaches and to prefer crowds and darkness. Of course, the roaches follow exactly the way which their robotic friends take. The second stage was programming the little robots to prefer a less-dark hiding spot, which was most hated by roaches. That stirred a chaotic uneasiness for the roaches but eventually they chose to settle down with their robotic friends, to stay at the brighter spot.
So, the result of the experiment means the hypothesis seems to be correct i.e. a group of individual bugs, each with just two cognitive “rules,” can make a collective decision about shelter. I believe not far from now, there would be effective robotic technique for luring or leading millions of roaches into leaving your apartment, and heading them towards your neighbors.
via [BotJunkie]
November 25th, 2007 at 11:18 pm
The principle can be applied to masses to and make them do what we want to. The leaders always did it with their people.