Underwater Cyborg Cockroaches: The Future of Rescue Missions

If you thought cockroaches were just unwelcome kitchen invaders, think again. Researchers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have transformed Madagascar hissing cockroaches into high-tech rescue drones—complete with custom diving suits that let them operate underwater for hours at a time.

The brains behind this unlikely innovation is Professor Hirotaka Sato and his team at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Their work started with a breakthrough: they discovered that Madagascar hissing cockroaches could be remotely controlled by installing electrodes on their sensory organs, turning them into programmable search-and-rescue robots. The idea was brilliant in theory, but hit a major snag in practice. Flooded disaster zones are exactly where you’d want to deploy a tiny, agile robot scout—except cockroaches hate water and can’t survive underwater. That’s where the diving suit came in.

The team engineered a 3D-printed resin diving suit that generates oxygen on demand. The clever part isn’t a bulky oxygen tank; instead, the suit uses a chemical reaction between hydrogen peroxide and manganese dioxide to produce breathable oxygen and deliver it directly to the cockroach’s spiracles. In testing, the rig worked flawlessly. Equipped with their underwater gear, the cyborg insects moved across the seafloor at speeds up to 78.4 millimeters per second—only 10 millimeters slower than their land-based pace—and could operate submerged for up to three hours.

The real proof came in the field. During Operation Lionheart, an actual search and rescue operation following the magnitude 7.7 earthquake that struck Myanmar in the spring of 2025, these diving-suit-wearing bugs played an active role. Professor Sato published details of the project in the journal Nature Communications, where he noted that expanding the operational parameters of cyborg insects to include underwater movement could genuinely enhance search and rescue operations in disaster scenarios.

But the team’s ambitions don’t stop at Earth. They’re eyeing something far more audacious: deploying these insect drones to explore the surface of Mars. It’s a goal that seems wild until you remember that a cockroach is infinitely more resilient than most robotic rovers, and infinitely smaller. The future of space exploration might just scuttle on six legs.