A Singapore lab fit living Madagascar cockroaches with 3D printed rigs that chemically produce oxygen, extending cyborg insects from land to water for disaster zone scouting and, eventually, Mars.
A finger-sized Madagascar hissing cockroach walked along the bottom of a lab tank for hours this week, steered remotely through a chip implanted in its body and breathing through a 3D-printed "scuba suit" that holds no oxygen tank. The run is the first peer-reviewed demonstration of an amphibious cyborg insect, according to the paper published this week in Nature Communications by Hirotaka Sato's group at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore.
The team chose the Madagascar hissing cockroach (Gromphadorhina portentosa) for its size, hardiness, and lifespan of up to five years, traits that make it useful for long missions in harsh environments. New Scientist reports the suit-wearing roaches walked underwater for about three hours at a stretch and moved at close to land speed, with Scientific American framing the same result as multi-hour diving and noting the insects showed no ill effects in the days after.
The engineering bet is not the controller; it is the suit.
Roaches breathe through small holes called spiracles, the everyday phrase is "breathing pores," arrayed along their abdomen. Sato's team 3D-printed a rig that wraps the roach's body, leaves the legs free, and channels air from the suit to the spiracles through small hoses near the legs so the suit does not restrict walking. The suit contains no pressurized gas. Instead, it holds a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and manganese dioxide that slowly decomposes into oxygen and water, with the oxygen diffusing through a breathable membrane to the insect. The result is an in-situ oxygen factory rather than a tank, and the NTU press release frames the rig as the missing piece that lets an insect carry its own air supply.
The team also moved the controller chip and its tiny battery inside the roach's body. Earlier versions had been strapped on as a backpack, which the researchers found restricted mobility. The full implanted controller is the basis of the group's prior work, including a 2024 paper in Cyborg and Bionic Systems on land mobility and challenging terrain. Cyborg insect research has been land-only for years, and DIY cyborg-roach kits are already commercially available; the Singapore result is the first to extend the platform from land to water with a peer-reviewed, repeatable benchmark.
What the researchers did not demonstrate is just as important. The dives were conducted in calm lab water, not flooded rubble, mine shafts, or open current. The roaches were steered, but cyborg insects do not match the control fidelity of purpose-built robots, a gap the team acknowledges. And the bioethics of mass-producing living insects with implanted hardware is an open question the paper does not resolve.
Disaster response is the nearer-term application pitch for this technology. The nearer-term one is disaster response: collapsed buildings, broken levees, mine rescues, where today's robot scouts are expensive and short-lived. An insect-scale scout that can survive a flood and keep walking is closer to a real deployment than the longer-horizon goal, which is Mars.
"The ultimate goal is to [take this technology to] space," Sato told New Scientist. "It's kind of one step, one big step, towards space suits for cyborg insects. Exploration over the Mars surface, for example." That framing is the research team's stated aspiration, not a current capability, and the paper does not test radiation, vacuum, or planetary-surface conditions. The gap between a Singapore lab tank and a Mars analog is still wide.
A slow decomposition reaction generates the oxygen the suit needs. A rig that generates its own oxygen from a slow decomposition reaction, weighs little enough for an insect to carry, and keeps the roach walking at near-land pace for hours is a concrete engineering result. The trigger coverage from Futurism re-reported the Nature paper; the underlying result, and the open question of whether it scales to flooded buildings or other planets, is what the team has now set up.