"articles from the  vancouver sun"

     A big brown cockroach crawls across the table in the laboratory of
Japan's most prestigious university. The researcher eyes it nervously, but he
doesn't go for the bug spray. He grabs the remote.
     This is no ordinary under-the-refrigerator-type bug.  This roach has
been surgically implanted with a micro-robotic backpack that allows 
researchers to control its movements.
     This is Robo-roach.
     "Insects can do many things that people can't," said assistant
professor Isao Shimoyama, head of the bio-robot research team at Tokyo
University. "The potential applications of this work formankind could be
immense."
     Within a few years, Shimoyama s ays, electronically controlled insects
carrying mini-cameras or other sensory devices couldbe used for a variety of
sensitive missions, like crawling through earthquake rubble to search for
victims or slipping under  doors on espionage surveillance.
     Farfetched as that might seem, the Japanese government has deemed the
research credible enough to award the equivalent of $7 million Cdn to 
Shimoyama's micro-robotics team and biologists at  Tsukuba University, a
leading science centre in central Japan.
     Money from the five-year grant started coming in this month, and young
researchers are lining up for a slot on Shimoyama's team.
     The team breeds its own supply of several hundred cockroaches in
plastic bins. Not just any roach will do. Researchers use only the American
cockroach (Perplaneta americana) because it  is bigger and hardier than most
other species. From that supply, they select roaches to be fitted with hi-tech
"backpacks" - tiny microprocessor and electrode set.
     Before surgery, researchers gas the roach with carbon dioxide. Wings
and antennae are removed. Where the antennae used to be, researchers fit
pulse-emitting electrodes.
     With a remote, researchers send signals to the backpacks which
stimulate the electrodes.
     The pulsing electrodes make the roach turn left, turn right, scamper
forward or spring backward.
     Over the past three years, researchers have reduced the weight of the
backpack to 2.8 grams, or about twice the weight of the roaches themselves.
     "Cockroaches are very strong," said Swiss researcher Raphael Holzer
part of the Tokyo University team. "They can lift 20 times their own weight."
     The controls, however, still have a few serious bugs on their own.
     Holzer jolts a roach with an electric pulse to make it move slightly
to the right and keep to a 2.5-centimetre-wide path. Instead, th
e roach races
off the edge of a table into Holzer's out-stretched hands.
     "The placement of the electrodes is still very inexact," he admits.
     While a backpack-fitted roach can survive for several months, it
becomes less sensitive to the electronic pulses over time. That's a big proble
if the bugs are to be used on longer missions.
     Holzer is optimistic. "The technology isn't so difficult," he said.
"The difficulty is to really understand what is happening in the nervous
system."
     And technology aside, Robo-roach is still, after all, a roach.
     "They arenot very nice insects," Holzer confesses. "They are a little
bit smelly, and there's something aboutthe way they move their antennae. But
they look nicer when you put a little circuit on their backs and remove their
wings." (END)

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