People use a lot of words to describe the reviled cockroach: disgusting, sneaky and repulsive, to name but a few. But it might be time to add a new one: inspirational. Scientists said this week they had built a small search-and-rescue robot inspired by cockroaches' ability to squeeze through tiny crevices. The robot is designed to navigate through rubble to find survivors after natural disasters or bomb blasts."Cockroaches... can teach us important design principles," Robert Full, professor of integrative biology at the University of California in Berkeley, said.Using a specially built obstacle course, the researchers watched cockroaches scurry through crevices smaller than a quarter of their height in less than a second by compressing their jointed exoskeletons by half.Once inside the crevice, the cockroaches managed to move rapidly, at nearly 20 body lengths a second, their legs splayed out to the side."If you scale it up to the size of a human, it would be equivalent to about 113km/h," said Harvard University biologist Kaushik Jayaram, who worked on the research while at UC-Berkeley. ..