You’ve seen the living Terminator sculpture, now check out this bizarre biohybrid robot that is controlled by fungus. That’s right, Cornell researchers cultivated fungal mycelia and then harnessed its innate electrical signals to control “biohybrid” robots.
These biohybrid robots aren’t just static sculptures either, as they can potentially react to their environment better than their purely synthetic counterparts. Mycelia was chosen because it can grow in harsh conditions and have the ability to sense biological signals as well as respond to multiple inputs. Researchers built two biohybrid robots: a soft, spider-shaped robot shaped and a wheeled bot.
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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. By growing mycelium into the electronics of a robot, we were able to allow the biohybrid machine to sense and respond to the environment. In this case we used light as the input, but in the future it will be chemical. The potential for future robots could be to sense soil chemistry in row crops and decide when to add more fertilizer,” said Rob Shepherd, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in Cornell Engineering.
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