Defence engineers are excited about a future technology they hope will find people lost in disaster zones – robot locusts! Just unleash a plague and watch the missing come running!
All the swarming destruction of locusts, combined with the emotionless power of robots! What could go wrong? / Sure, you laugh now…
Of course, making robots the size of locusts does make it harder for them to crush us mercilessly. They’ll have to use their laser eyes.
The best thing about robot locusts is that they can never malfunction and devour all human food crops, leaving us starving and unable to fight back, eventually leading to the decimation of the species and the end of the world as we know it. Which is nice.
So far, the robot locusts work much better in a flight and rescue situation than the robot bears did, and with far fewer casualties.
Unfortunately you can only feed the robot locusts on electric cornfields. And sadly, there’s no such thing. / So they’ll have to invent those first.
The robots with flapping locust-like wings would scour collapsed or burning buildings, searching for survivors, in a way that a conventional fixed-wing aircraft can’t. And it’s far more effective at devouring their faces.
The robots with flapping locust-like wings could scour collapsed buildings and search for survivors, in a way that a conventional fixed-wing aircraft can’t. However, conventional fixed-wing aircraft do have the important advantage of ACTUALLY EXISTING.
However, the robo-locusts do have a tendency to swarm, and unlike real locusts, then have the ability to join together and form the unstoppable Insektron Prime.
They have to design the locust-like robots, after tests with regular locusts showed that they were not as interested in finding survivors as they were in swarming uncontrollably. / eating some crops. / decimating crops.
They initially made robot bees, but their hinges kept getting gummed up with honey.
Conventional fixed-wing aircraft are inappropriate for searching inside buildings for survivors. That’s one thing we learnt from September 11.
The military have also showed interest in the project. Which is no surprise – if anything cool is ever invented, they immediately want to strap bombs to it. / want to know how to use it to kill people.
Once you get down to a certain size, fixed-wing aircraft are unable to fly. And, unfortunately, unable to really provide any actual help in a rescue. / And a tiny rolling aeroplane is of limited benefit in a bushfire.
The rescue-bots will be great at locating people in places larger drones would never be able to access. But to actually rescue someone, you need 400 of them. / Unfortunately, once they’ve found you, all they can do is buzz.
They decided to model the robots on locusts, after the initial tests with mosquitobots just resulted in mechanical bloodsucking freaks intent on using humans as food. The military is still interested…
Finally emergency services will have a robot to find survivors. And all at such a low cust.
Locusts are excited about the development. They’re hoping they can get a few robots in to clean up after their swarming.
Wasps will be hoping to commandeer a few of the robot locusts. They’re so sick of flapping their own wings.
Locusts are extremely energy-efficient. They’d make for a great source of renewable energy if they didn’t destroy all our food in the process.
