Recently several engineering students from Case Western Reserve competed to build a robo-mower. The students who created this mower took some of the design from biology’s example of a cockroach. While cockroaches don’t have brains, they are good at navigating and avoiding hazards, which is basically what a self guided lawn mower needs to do. To get the machine around the team developed sensors that mimic the tiny hairs and antenna cockroaches use. For instance, instead of hairs to let it know where it is and how fast it’s going, it is equipped with a motion- and acceleration-sensing system. Its’ antenna is a “laser range-finder that sweeps the area ahead of the mower to check for obstacles” and a global positioning system receiver judges the robot’s location.