First living robots developed from frog embryos
BOSTON: Researchers have built the first ever “living robot”, or xenobot, by engineering frog embryos in the lab to behave like “living, programmable organisms”, an advance that may lead to computer-designed life forms capable of delivering drugs in the human body.
The xenobots were millimetre-wide robots, designed by stitching together different cell types from a frog embryo in specific ways so that they could move towards a target on their own, and also based on how the cells interacted with each other, the study, published in the journal PNAS, noted.
The bots were also engineered to pick up a payload - like a medicine that needs to be carried to a specific place inside a patient -- and could heal themselves after being cut, according to the researchers.
“These are novel living machines. They’re neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It’s a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism,” said study co-author Joshua Bongard, a robotics expert at the University of Vermont in the US.
According to the researchers, the xenobots may lead to novel machines in a wide range of fields like detecting toxic contamination in the environment, gathering microplastic in the oceans, and also scrapping out blocks in blood vessels. The scientists developed a complex algorithm which could self-learn and evolve to create candidate designs for the new life-forms. PTI