telegraph | The world’s first living robots have been built using stem cells from frog embryos, in a strange machine-animal hybrid that scientists say is an ‘entirely new life-form.’
Dubbed ‘xenobots’ because they are constructed of biological material
taken from the Xenopus laevis frog, the little bots are the first to be
constructed from living cells.
Researchers are hopeful they could be programmed to move through arteries scraping away plaque, or swim through oceans removing toxic microplastic.
And because they are alive, they can replicate and repair themselves if damaged or torn.
“These are novel living machines,” said Dr Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont, who co-led the new research.
“They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It's a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism.”
Living organisms have often been manipulated by humans in the past, right down to their DNA code, but this is the first time that biological machines have been built completely from scratch.
Scientists first used the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at the University of Vermont to create an algorithm that assembled a few hundred virtual skin and heart cells into a myriad forms and body shapes, for specific tasks.
Researchers are hopeful they could be programmed to move through arteries scraping away plaque, or swim through oceans removing toxic microplastic.
And because they are alive, they can replicate and repair themselves if damaged or torn.
“These are novel living machines,” said Dr Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont, who co-led the new research.
“They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It's a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism.”
Living organisms have often been manipulated by humans in the past, right down to their DNA code, but this is the first time that biological machines have been built completely from scratch.
Scientists first used the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at the University of Vermont to create an algorithm that assembled a few hundred virtual skin and heart cells into a myriad forms and body shapes, for specific tasks.
Based on the blueprints, a team of biologists from Tufts University, Massachusetts, then assembled the cells into living bots, just one millimetre wide.
