Autonomous vehicles are said to be safer than human drivers – but would you trust a mushroom behind the wheel? A new kind of “biohybrid” robot moves in response to signals from the nervous system of a fungus.
A few decades of human engineering can’t compete with billions of years of evolution, so rather than reinvent the wheel it’s often better to just incorporate nature’s versions of things into synthetic systems. That’s why we have robots with super-sensitive locust ears, robot fish that swim thanks to beating human heart cells, and robots that crawl using sea slug muscles. Ultimately, this method could make for more responsive robots.
Now, scientists at Cornell University have developed a new biohybrid robot that uses components from beyond the animal kingdom: fungi. These organisms sense and communicate using electrical signals sent through their mycelium, the root system. So the team grew the mycelium directly into the electronics of a robot, tapping into those natural signals to drive the machine.
The researchers created an electrical interface that accurately records the electrophysiological activity from the mycelia, processes it, and converts it into a digital signal that the robot can understand. When sent to the actuators, the robot moves in response to the fungus, which itself sends out signals in response to environmental changes, like light.
The team built two versions of these biohybrid robots. One is a relatively simple-looking wheeled unit, while the other is kind of spider-shaped with soft legs. In both cases, a Petri dish of fungus sits on top, where it can respond to light and other stimuli, before sending signals to the legs or wheels to get moving.
Both types of robot were then put through three experiments. First, the robots moved based on natural continuous spikes in the signals from the mycelia. In the second experiment, the scientists shined ultraviolet light onto the fungus, which made them change the way they moved. And finally, the team was able to demonstrate that they could override the fungus signal entirely if they needed to manually control the robot.
While light was the only direct stimulus tested so far, the team says that future versions could incorporate multiple inputs, such as chemical signatures. The idea is that living systems are naturally great at responding to multiple inputs like light, heat, and pressure, where synthetic versions would need individual, specialized sensors for each.
“This paper is the first of many that will use the fungal kingdom to provide environmental sensing and command signals to robots to improve their levels of autonomy,” said Rob Shepherd, senior author of the study. “The potential for future robots could be to sense soil chemistry in row crops and decide when to add more fertilizer, for example, perhaps mitigating downstream effects of agriculture like harmful algal blooms.”
The research was published in the journal Science Robotics. The spider robot can be seen in action in the video below.
Source: Cornell University
