Scientists build first-of-their-kind ‘living’ robots
A team of scientists has built ‘xenobots’ with repurposed living cells, removed from frog embryos. These xenobots, with a width of a millimeter, can move toward a set target, for instance, for the purposes of internal drug delivery, and can also heal themselves after being cut. Joshua Bongard, a Computer Scientist and Robotics Expert at the University of Vermont, co-lead of the study, describes the bots as ‘novel living machines.’ They are neither a robot in the traditional sense of the word, nor are they a known species of animal; they are a novel class of artifact, ‘a living, programmable organism,’ according to Bongard.
The new creatures were designed using a supercomputer at the University and were then assembled and tested by Tufts University biologists. Michael Levin, Director, Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology, Tufts University, and a co-lead of the research, believes that their invention has many useful applications that other machines cannot perform such as identifying nasty compounds or radioactive contamination, collecting microplastics present in water bodies like oceans, traveling into arteries to remove plaque.
However, the team states that this research has for the first time ever designed completely biological machines from scratch. The group, including lead author and doctoral candidate Sam Kriegman, used the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at UVM’s Vermont Advanced Computing Core, created thousands of candidate designs for the new machines by using an evolutionary algorithm, out of which the most promising designs were chosen for testing. Then, the Tufts team, led by Levin, along with microsurgeon Douglas Blackiston, brought to life the in-silico designs.
Firstly, they collected stem cells from the embryos of African frogs, belonging to the species Xenopus laevis; thus the name ‘xenobots.’ After being separated, the individual cells were left to incubate and were then cut and joined under a microscope with the help of tiny forceps and electrode in the shape of the design generated by the computer. The cells began to work together, following forward motion as was guided by the computer’s designs and assisted by spontaneous, self-organizing patterns, which enabled the robots to move on their own. This scientific marvel is both the stuff of miracles and nightmares.
