Engineers have officially managed to develop a biohybrid robot utilizing fungi. According to scientists, the edible mushroom — called a king oyster mushroom — uses electrical signals to sense its surroundings and move around.
The robot was a combined effort between a team of interdisciplinary students from Cornell University in the US and Florence University in Italy. “Living systems respond to touch, they respond to light, they respond to heat, they respond to even some unknowns, like signals,” Anand Mishra, a research associate in the Organic Robotics Lab at Cornell told The Independent .
“That’s why we think, OK, if you wanted to build future robots, how can they work in an unexpected environment? We can leverage these living systems, and any unknown input comes in, the robot will respond to that.”
The bizarre contraption, which could usher in a new age of living robotics, features five crab-like legs with a capsule at the center. In a video obtained by the outlet, the fungi was placed into the central chamber and was given a zap of electricity from a wire that was connected to the device.
In response to the stimulus, the legs on the machine seemed to curl up for a few seconds before falling back down. The spasms continued for the duration of the video which saw the contraption move around. In another video published by the outlet, the fungi could be seen using a wheeled system to move around.
Many researchers stated that the mobility of the specimen and its ability to sense chemical and biological signals suggested that it could be useful in a range of applications.
"By growing mycelium into the electronics of a robot, we were able to allow the biohybrid machine to sense and respond to the environment,” said Rob Shepherd, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell.
“The potential for future robots could be to sense soil chemistry in row crops and decide when to add more fertilizer, for example, perhaps mitigating downstream effects of agriculture like harmful algal blooms.”
The researchers have since published their findings in a study called "Sensorimotor control of robots mediated by electro-physiological measurements of fungal mycelia" which can be found in the journal "Science Robotics."
This is not the first time that organisms and technology have melded into one. It was reported by IBT that Artificial intelligence researchers officially managed to upload a digital simulation of a worm's brain into a machine that was then able to recreate the animal's movements and intentions.
According to the OpenWorm project, the aim is for the robot to mimic primitive worm behaviors like feeding, locomotion and mate-finding. However, so far the group has been limited to obstacle avoidance.
"We are using a bottom-up approach, aimed at observing the worm behavior emerge from a simulation of data derived from scientific experiments carried out over the past decade," the researchers said to the outlet. "To do so we are incorporating the data available in the scientific community into software models."
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