US scientists have come up with a robot cockroach that can squeeze through small spaces like the real bug and believe something similar could be used to locate survivors in collapsed buildings.
Nature has given the cockroach an amazing set of attributes that help explain why if all else was laid waste this insect would be among the few survivors.
They move at a startling pace, about 60cm a second making them almost impossible to stamp on before disappearing under the fridge.
And if you do manage to line one up under your shoe then be sure to step down hard. They readily survive crushing at pressures up to 900 times their body weight without injury.
Their jointed shell allows them to shape-change at will, compressing themselves down to 40 per cent of their normal height to squeeze through a crack no more than 4mm across.
Their remarkable attributes were studied by a research team at the University of California, Berkeley who were hoping for "bioinspiration" in the development of robot cockroaches for use in rescue missions. They built a cockroach assault course and then put the American cockroach (Periplaneta americana) through its paces to see what it could do.
Convinced by what they saw they built a palm-sized soft robot cockroach with a flexible shell and six scurrying legs and let it loose to see how well it performed.
The robot was much bigger than the real thing but it moved along nicely and can compress its normal height by half.
A robot cockroach with similar skills might one day be used to navigate challenging spaces such as collapsed buildings in an earthquake zone, the researchers Kaushik Jayaram and Robert Full argue in a research report in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
