I am one of those who think that cockroaches are one of the grossest things alive, and these critters do not seem to die no matter what you do – bug sprays, roach traps, the works. In fact, it is said that if you kill one, there are plenty more of its brethren that remain unseen. Here is an amalgamation of the old and the new, in the form of the Twitter Roach, where it “wears” a small backpack which receives customized wireless signals, followed by transferring the received signals into a stimulus that is sent straight to the critter’s antennae. I guess you can say that it works in a similar manner as that of other robotic cockroaches, although this time around, an Arduino processor is at work, where it receives input from Twitter.
Artist Brittany Ransom is the one behind the Twitter Roach, and this project will explore whether insects are able to respond to an overabundance of external signals in a way that humans do. Will cockroaches be able to develop the same type of selective response as us? Hopefully not, or they will in the end be smarter than us, and I’d loathe a world that is over-run with roaches.