- Will the robots of the future be made of living flesh?
(electronic music)
If you ever find yourself in a place of existential dread
at the oncoming robot apocalypse,
just do what I do.
Fire up a montage of robots falling over
at the DARPA robotics challenge.
Not so scary now, are they?
These robots represent the best and brightest
in engineering and robotics,
experts in software and hardware,
and they really show how this mechanical is both new
and limited.
Not like biological organisms.
You see, living organisms are energy efficient,
and a lot of them are extremely elegant.
This is where that old adage comes into play.
"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."
Literally.
Join them.
There are researchers who are now looking
at joining robotics with living, biological, flesh.
Take the work of a team from Case Western Reserve's
biologically inspired robotics laboratory.
In July 2016, they announced they had developed
a special robot
made up of 3D printed soft plastic parts
and the disembodied mouth muscle
from a California sea slug.
When they expose the robot to an external electric field,
the muscle contracts and the robot moves.
They envision a future where swarms of these robots
can enter the water and search for everything
from a toxic leak to an aircraft's black box,
and they can actually draw nutrients from the water,
powering those living tissue cells.
And the slugbot isn't alone.
There are also some researchers out of Harvard
who have developed artificial biological entities
like a jellyfish,
and later on a sting-ray.
And both of them use special actuators,
you know the things that make robots move,
designed from the living tissue of rats' hearts.
Macabre? Maybe.
But it also makes a weird sort of sense,
because hearts are organs that react to stimuli
and move a fluid around,
and jellyfish and stingrays are organisms
that react to stimuli and move through a fluid.
Now all of these things accomplish fluid movement
in a very similar way through these undulating
muscular movements,
so why not really pursue realism
and create silicone robot bodies
with layers of thin tissue from rat heart muscle.
The resulting biobots
swim like the real thing.
Maybe a little too real.
And the researchers went even further with the stingrays
using lab-cultured genetically modified rat heart
muscle tissue that could react to light,
which meant that could move it through
a little obstacle course
mad-scientist style.
These experiments are more than just demonstration
of human ingenuity,
the team actually hopes to lay the groundwork
for better artificial hearts in the future.
Human hearts.
You see they want to culture a patient's own cells
to build biohybrid hearts.
It could actually change shape and size
depending upon the patient's status
at any given time.
Plus, robots that have living tissue in them are non-toxic,
so if your oceancrawler robot
or you living heart robot were to break down,
it's not gonna poison the water or the patient.
But I've got a question for you guys this week.
As we get better at developing cruelty free
living animal tissue in the lab,
should we build more biorobots?
And what would you use your biorobots to do,
I wanna hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Thanks to Toyota for sponsoring the show
and making it possible.
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