LIVING MACHINES

BIOHYBRIDS BRING THE POWER OF NATURE TO ROBOTICS

- DAMIEN MARTIN

Plants and animals have been evolving for millions of years. Humans have been tinkering with robotics for a couple millennia, with industrial robots around for less than 100 years. Maybe we can learn a thing or two from the natural world when it comes to engineering our world. That's the aim of biohybrids, robots that make use of living organisms in their operations.

"Mechanisms, including computing, understanding and action as a response, are done in the biological world and in the artificial world that humans have created, and biology, most of the time, is better at it than our artificial systems are," Robert Shepherd, head of Cornell University's Organic Robotics Lab, told CNN. "Biohybridization is an attempt to find components in the biological world that we can harness, understand, and control to help our artificial systems work better."

ROBO-FUNGI

Shepherd's team at Cornell has developed a pair of robots that use the mycelia of king oyster mushrooms to control them via small electrical signals they produce. With the mycelia connected to electrodes, the electrical signals cause the robots to move. As mushrooms tend to grow in dark places and shy away from light, the researchers shine UV light on the biohybrids, causing them to move in the opposite direction.

"Fungi may have advantages over other biohybrid approaches in terms of the conditions required to keep them alive," Victoria Webster-Wood, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Biohybrid and Organic Robotics Group, told CNN. "If they are more robust to environmental conditions this could make them an excellent candidate for biohybrid robots for applications in agriculture and marine monitoring or exploration."