“It’s really cells that they manipulate, so I find it maybe the cleanest way.”īut are xenobots more like living organisms or traditional robots? “I don’t feel any closer to an answer. “The approach here is maybe ethically the least problematic because everything is in vitro, they just start with cells, they have no neurons, so it’s not an animal,” says Auke Ijspeert at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne, who wasn’t involved in the research. Xenobots differ from these because they are made entirely of living cells.

Previous attempts at creating living robots, such as a wirelessly controlled cockroach, have involved manipulating live animals, raising ethical concerns. “It sort of suggests, to me at least as a roboticist, is this a better path to making swarms of useful machines than it is to make swarms out of traditional robotic parts?” This is something in between, which I think is kind of interesting,” says team member Josh Bongard at the University of Vermont.

“Roboticists have been looking at swarm intelligence for a long time, biologists have been studying swarm intelligence in organisms. He therefore hopes that they can be used for biomedical and environmental applications. Read more: Robot swarm inspired by cells can keep moving even if its parts failīecause they are created from cells, the xenobots eventually break apart and are totally biodegradable, says team member Douglas Blackiston, also at Tufts University. The xenobots, which are between a quarter and half a millimetre in size, operate in robot swarms, meaning that a group of individual xenobots can work together to complete a task. This idea that even normal cells, not genetically modified, with a normal frog genome, are in fact capable of building something completely different.” “To me, one of the most exciting things here is plasticity. “The fundamental finding here is that when you liberate skin cells from their normal context, and you give them a chance to reimagine their multicellularity, they can build other things than what they normally build,” says Levin. They also live between three and seven days longer than their predecessors, which only lasted about seven days, and have the ability to sense their environment to some extent, turning red when exposed to blue light. Where the previous version relied on the contraction of heart muscle cells to move them forward by pushing off surfaces, these new xenobots swim around faster, being self-propelled by hair-like structures on their surface.

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