Engineers at NTU Singapore printed a flexible waterproof shell around an electrochemical module that turns water into breathable oxygen, letting instrumented insects stay underwater for hours.
A team at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore has turned a cockroach into a dive worker: strap a 3D-printed flexible shell to its back, hook up a miniaturized oxygen module, and the insect can move through water for hours without surfacing for air.
Prior cyborg-insect platforms, which marry living organisms to onboard electronics, were limited to land. They could cross rough ground and squeeze through small gaps that no wheeled robot can, but water was a hard line; even waterproofing the electronics left the animal unable to breathe once submerged. The NTU team's answer, described in Nature Communications, is not a passive air bubble. It is an active system that generates oxygen in situ, paired with a deformable shell that moves with the insect's body.
The shell is the load-bearing structure. Researchers at NTU's School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering 3D-printed a flexible, waterproof sheath custom-fit to the cockroach's abdomen, leaving the legs and antennae free. Inside sits an electrochemical module that splits water into oxygen and hydrogen, fed by the surrounding environment, so the animal gets a continuous breathable supply instead of a fixed air reservoir that would deplete. The result, the team reports, is sustained amphibious operation. The insect can crawl, swim, and traverse both terrain modes during a single mission, without the duty-cycle interruptions that would constrain any field deployment.
If the insect has to surface every few minutes to gulp air, the operational envelope collapses. The onboard oxygen module widens that envelope to hours rather than minutes. The proposed use cases are search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and infrastructure inspection in places wheeled and legged robots cannot reach: flooded buildings, contaminated waterways, broken culverts. Scientific American and Popular Science both flagged the mechanism in their coverage of the paper. Popular Science describes the suit as the first of its kind to actually work underwater for multi-hour durations.
The deployment-relevant figures (endurance, payload, control bandwidth under submersion, battery life) sit in the Nature paper, not the press release, and any quantitative claim needs to be checked against the publication before reuse. The institutional framing of those use cases, per NTU's announcement, is author intent. It is not a deployment.
The bioethics question is the thread most news coverage skips. The team's paper addresses the engineering, not the ethics, and the question of whether modified, instrumented insects with limited behavioral agency should be deployed in surveillance or rescue roles is the part the work does not take up. The underwater variant adds a respiratory constraint the animals did not evolve for, which puts the welfare question back on the table.
The paper itself is open access. Its endurance and payload tables are the right place to confirm the numbers before treating any of this as a deployable platform.