Drive To Discover Mechanical flying cockroach unveiled at Cal
lab BERKELEY, Calif. (KGO) -- Recently, the Department of
Homeland Security issued a proposal for a disposable robot that
could be used in search and rescue missions. This week, a lab at
UC Berkeley unveiled a contender: a mechanical cockroach with
wings. "What's really interesting here," says Ron Fearing, "is
that we don't have things that fly really well, that fly like
birds. And we don't have things that run really well, like a
cockroach or a rat can. But combining the two, we can actually
do more than with either of them by itself." Fearing is UC
Berkeley Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science. A year earlier, his lab, with grad student Paul
Birkmeyer, completed work on a 6-legged creature named DASH
(Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod). It was designed to crawl
around collapsed buildings in spaces too small for humans. But
some obstacles proved difficult to climb -- and DASH could be
faster. The new model is DASH+Wings. You