Scientists Created The First Living Robots Ever (And They're Squishy)

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  via The Guardian

  Scientists have just created the world's first living, programmable robots, and it doesn't look like the metallic humanoid you probably imagined. This little fleshy blob is less than a millimeter wide, and is controlled by a supercomputer that tells it where go to. Oh, and it was created from a frog's stem cells. Confused? Let us explain. 

  
  

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  via Giphy

  For a long time, scientists have been interested in the possibility of organic robots. Robots made from biological tissues can heal themselves when damaged, and fall apart like natural organisms when their task is finished. This means that organic robots could deliver drugs in the human body (noninvasively), remove plaque from artery walls, as well as working in the environment, cleaning up toxins and pollution and simply vanishing when the task is done. 

  In a major breakthrough, scientists in the US created robots that can do just this. Xenobots are an entirely new lifeform: living, controllable robots made from organic material. 

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  via Giphy

  To create the xenobots, researchers scraped living stem cells from African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) embryos and left them to incubate. A supercomputer then generated random 3D configurations of 500 to 1,000 of the frog skin and heart cells. Because heart cells naturally contract and relax (and skin cells don't), they behave like tiny engines that power the little flesh blob robots until their energy runs out (they live from a week to ten days). 

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  via Giphy

  The combination of active cells (from the heart, which move spontaneously) and passive cells (from skin, which doesn't move) created unique structures and movement patterns of the xenobots. In the GIF above, the blue section of the animated xenobot is a collection of passive cells, and the red and green area are active cells (which move the robot). 

  With this information, computer scientists ran evolutionary algorithms, which replicate the process of natural selection and helped scientists to discover which structure is the best in terms of functionality. The structures that function (or move) the best are duplicated and become the new generation of "evolved" xenobots. 

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  via Wired

  There are hundreds of designs that could potentially work for successful xenobots, so the only way forward is to design and test them all. The researchers have to spend a lot of time watching the xenobots moving around a water-filled petri dish (without water the frog stem cells would die). The way the xenobots move is quite eerie, considering that they don't have brains. 

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  via Giphy

  If left on their own, the xenobots will move in one direction, then turn around and go back. If they find loose cells, they'll herd them into little groups. Some of them like to do zoomies around and around. If a xenobot gets cut in half, it will just put itself back together again. Sometimes, two xenobots roam around together like best friends. A xenobot with a hole in the middle like a doughnut can pick things up and move them around. 

  Xenobots are a new type of lifeform that will change the robotics game forever. Rather than creating a robot from unintelligent materials and creating an intelligent machine, xenobots are created from inherently intelligent materials: cells. The future of robotics is looking promising.

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