A wheeled robot rolls across the floor. A soft-bodied robotic star bends its five legs, moving with a clumsy motion.
Powered by conventional electricity via plug or battery, these simple robotic creations would be irrelevant, but what sets these two apart robots is that they are controlled by a living entity : one king oyster mushroom .
By growing the mushroom’s mycelium, or root-like filaments, on robot hardware, a team led by researchers at Cornell University in the United States has designed two types of robots that perceive and respond to the environment taking advantage of the electrical signals generated by the fungus and its sensitivity to light .
Robots are the latest achievement of scientists in a field known as bio-hybrid robotics which seeks combine biological and living materials such as plant and animal or insect cells, with synthetic components to create entities that are partly living and partly machines.
Bio-hybrid robots haven’t left the lab yet, but researchers hope that one day robotic jellyfish could explore oceans, sperm-powered robots could deliver fertility treatments, and cyborg cockroaches could search for survivors after an earthquake.
“Mechanisms, including computation, understanding and action in response, exist in the biological world and in the artificial world that humans have created, and biology is often better at this than our artificial systems,” said Robert Shepherd, senior author of a study detailing the robots, published on August 28 in the journal Science Robotics.
“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,” added Shepherd, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University who leads the school’s Organic Robotics Laboratory.
Part fungus, part machine
The team started by cultivating king oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus eryngii) in the lab from a simple kit ordered online. The researchers chose this mushroom species because it grows easily and quickly.
They cultivated the mushroom’s filamentous structures, or mycelium, which can form networks that the study suggests can sense, communicate, and transport nutrients — functioning a bit like neurons in a brain. Unfortunately, it’s not strictly accurate to call these creations “mushroom robots.” The mushroom is the fruit of the fungus — the robots are powered by the root-like mycelium.
The mycelium produces small electrical signals and can be connected to electrodes.
Andrew Adamatzky, a professor of unconventional computing at the University of the West of England in Bristol, England, who builds fungal computers, said it was unclear how fungi produce electrical signals.
“Nobody knows for sure,” said Adamatzky, who was not involved in the research but reviewed it before publication.
“Essentially all living cells produce spikes similar to the action potential, and fungi are no exception.”
The study team struggled to design a system that could detect and use the tiny electrical signals from the mycelia to control the robot.
“You have to make sure the electrode touches the right position because the mycelia are very thin. There’s not a lot of biomass there,” said lead author Anand Mishra, a postdoctoral research associate in Cornell’s Organic Robotics Laboratory. “So you grow them, and when the mycelia start growing, they wrap around the electrode.”
Mishra designed an electrical interface that accurately reads the raw electrical activity of the mycelia, processes it, and converts it into digital information that can activate the robot’s actuators or moving parts.
The robots were able to walk and roll in response to electrical spikes generated by the mycelia, and when Mishra and his colleagues stimulated the robots with ultraviolet light, they changed their pace and trajectory, showing that they were able to respond to their environment.
“Mushrooms really don’t like light,” Shepherd said. “Based on the difference in intensities, you can get different functions from the robot. It will move faster or move away from the light.”
“Exciting” work
It’s exciting to see more work in biohybrid robotics that goes beyond human, animal and insect tissue, said Victoria Webster-Wood, an associate professor in the Biohybrid and Organic Robotics Group at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
“Fungi may have advantages over other biohybrid approaches in terms of the conditions needed to keep them alive,” said Webster-Wood, who was not involved in the research.
“If they are more robust to environmental conditions, this could make them an excellent candidate for bio-hybrid robots for applications in agriculture and marine monitoring or exploration.”
The study noted that fungi can be cultivated in abundance and can thrive in many different environments.
The researchers operated the wheeled robot without a cable connecting it to the electrical hardware, a feat that Webster-Wood found particularly remarkable.
“Truly tetherless biohybrid robots are a challenge in the field,” she said in an email, “and seeing them achieve this with the mycelium system is quite exciting.”
Bio-hybrid robotics in the real world
Fungal-controlled technology could have applications in agriculture, Shepherd said.
“In this case, we used light as input, but in the future it will be chemistry. The potential for future robots could be to detect soil chemistry in row crops and decide when to add more fertilizer, for example, perhaps mitigating downstream effects of agriculture like harmful algal blooms,” he told the Cornell Chronicle.
Fungal-controlled robots, and fungal computing more broadly, have enormous potential, according to Adamatzky.
He said his lab has produced more than 30 sensing and computing devices using living fungi, including growing self-sufficient skin for robots that can respond to light and touch.
“When a suitable transmission system is provided, the robot could, for example, monitor the health of ecological systems. The fungal controller would react to changes, such as air pollution, and guide the robot accordingly,” Adamatzky said in an email.
“The emergence of yet another fungal device, a robotic controller, excitingly demonstrates the remarkable potential of fungi.”
Rafael Mestre, a professor at the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton in the UK who works on the social, ethical and policy implications of emerging technologies, said that if bio-hybrid robots become more sophisticated and are deployed in the ocean or other ecosystem, it could disrupt habitats, challenging the traditional distinction between life and machine.
“You’re putting these things into the food chain of an ecosystem in a place where they shouldn’t be,” said Mestre, who was not involved in the new study. “If you release them in large numbers, it could be disruptive. I don’t see, at this point, that this particular research has strong ethical concerns. But if it continues to develop, I think it’s crucial to consider what happens when we release this into the open.”
This content was originally published in US scientists build robot that combines fungus and machine on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
Charles Grill is a tech-savvy writer with over 3 years of experience in the field. He writes on a variety of technology-related topics and has a strong focus on the latest advancements in the industry. He is connected with several online news websites and is currently contributing to a technology-focused platform.
