Self-driving cars are supposedly safer than human drivers, but would you trust a mushroom behind the wheel? A new type of “bio-hybrid” robot moves by responding to the nervous system signals of fungi.
Since decades of human engineering can’t keep up with billions of years of evolution, it’s often better to integrate natural versions of things into synthetic systems rather than reinvent the wheel. That’s why we have robots with super-sensitive grasshopper ears, robot fish that swim thanks to beating human heart cells, and robots that crawl using the muscles of sea snails. Ultimately, this approach can lead to more responsive robots.
Now, scientists at Cornell University have developed a new biohybrid robot that uses a component beyond the animal kingdom: fungi. These organisms sense and communicate using electrical signals transmitted through their mycelium, or root system. So the team grew mycelium directly into the robot’s electronics, harnessing these natural signals to power the machine.
The researchers created an electrical interface that precisely records, processes, and converts the mycelium’s electrophysiological activity into digital signals that the robot can understand. When sent to an actuator, the robot moves in response to the fungus, and the fungus itself sends signals in response to environmental changes, such as light.
The team has created two versions of this bio-hybrid robot, one a relatively simple-looking wheeled unit and the other a spider-like one with soft legs. In both cases, a petri dish containing the fungus sits on top, responding to light and other stimuli, then sending signals to the legs or wheels to move.
The two types of robots were subjected to three experiments. First, the robots moved in response to the natural, continuous spikes of signals coming from the mycelium. In a second experiment, the scientists shined ultraviolet light on the fungus, which changed the way it moved. Finally, the team showed that the robots could be completely ignored if they had to be controlled manually.
So far, the only direct stimulus tested has been light, but the team says future versions could incorporate multiple inputs, such as chemical signatures. The idea is that while living systems are naturally good at responding to multiple inputs, such as light, heat, and pressure, a synthetic version would require individual, specialized sensors for each.
“This paper is the first of many that use the fungal kingdom to provide environmental sensing and command cues to robots, improving their level of autonomy,” said Rob Shepherd, the study’s lead author. “The potential for future robots is to sense soil chemistry in crop fields and decide when to add more fertilizer, for example to mitigate downstream effects of agriculture, such as harmful algal blooms.”
The study was published in the journal. Science RoboticsYou can see the spider robot in action in the video below.
Fungal Control Biohybrid Robot
Source: Cornell University
