Cyborgs muscle in on the human form
DC Comics’ Cyborg is a selfhealing, rocket-powered, humanmachine hybrid who saves the world from an army of dead titans.
Tokyo University’s cyborg is not quite at that level yet, but it is nevertheless pretty impressive at bending on demand and picking up plastic hoops.
One of the current goals of robotics is to produce ‘‘biohybrid’’ machines that exploit the properties of natural materials, which are in many cases still superior to the nearest artificial alternative.
In particular, engineers want to find a way to incorporate muscles into machines.
‘‘Living tissue is light and highly energy efficient,’’ said Shoji Takeuchi, from the university.
This means that machines using it would be "soft, flexible and smooth", he said - if not yet capable, alas, of smiting evil abominations intent on global destruction.
Before either goal can be achieved, however, one significant obstacle has to be overcome. Although it is relatively routine these days to grow muscle in a laboratory, attempts to incorporate it into mechanical devices have been hampered by its tendency to contract and shrink over time, becoming unusable.
For a paper in the journal Science Robotics, Professor Takeuchi and his team found a potential solution.
Conventionally, biohybrid robots have used muscle tissue cultured on a flexible medium, that the muscles then bend by contracting.
He and his colleagues instead created a robot that used a system closer to that found in nature.
They grew strips of rat muscle in a lab, then attached them in opposing pairs to a rigid skeleton that was a bit like a finger. Just like in our own fingers, where muscles come in pairs, this enabled them to contract and expand, balancing each other out and stretching as well as squeezing.
The result was a robotic finger that could keep on picking things up for a week without showing signs of shrinkage.
Takeuchi said that one immediate application of the system would be in medical testing. By mimicking human muscle systems, researchers could examine diseases and treatments without testing on animals, whose tissues may also behave differently.
He said they were seeing if this could be used to investigate ALS, the degenerative condition from which Stephen Hawking suffered.
‘‘We are now working on combining the skeletal muscle tissue with motor neurons for the control of muscle contraction by neural signals,’’ he said.
He was clear that his team was not ignoring the possibility of applying it towards more cyborgrelated ends too.
‘‘Our approach might be a great step towards the construction of more complex system,’’ he said.
‘‘If we can combine more of these muscles into a single device, we should be able to reproduce the complex muscular interplay that allow hands, arms, and other parts of the body to function.’’
The titans should watch out.
– The Times