Topline
Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have built a small robot capable of swimming that is powered by living muscle cells instead of a traditional motor, technology researchers say can be used for purposes like exploring fragile environments or microsurgeries.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a robot powered by muscle cells. (Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
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Key Facts
A “paper-thin” robot developed by MIT scientists, built with live muscle cells that are engineered to respond to flashes of light, was able to swim through a maze, according to MIT News.
The robot is about the length and width of a stick of gum, and it is lined with a layer of muscle cells that are thinner than a strand of hair, making it the first example of a thin, two-dimensional robot capable of locomotion, researchers said.
Researchers published a study in the “Advanced Functional Materials” journal this week which found the robot could swim through the maze at a speed of four times its body length in one minute, which lead author and associate professor of mechanical engineering Ritu Raman said indicates the robot is “quite strong” for its size.
Raman told MIT News most biohybrid robots—which combine living tissue with electronics or other synthetic material—are “bulky” and require millions of cells, suggesting the biohybrid robot her team developed could be cheaper to build and may move more efficiently.
what to watch for
Raman told MIT News the researchers’ next goal is to “optimize the body design to enable faster swimming.” Even at a slower speed, though, Raman said the robot could be used for environmental monitoring in aquatic environments. In the future, such robots powered by muscle cells may be able to perform “delicate jobs like exploring environments too fragile or unpredictable for conventional hardware,” Raman said, because muscle tissue is “soft, responsive to its surroundings, and can heal itself.” In the study, researchers wrote biohybrid technology could eventually be used for “future applications ranging from precision microsurgery to unmanned exploration.”
key background
Last year, Raman’s lab developed what she called the “first skeletal muscle-powered robot that generates force in more than one direction.” Researchers stamped a gel disk with microscopic grooves they then deposited live cells on to, which then grew and formed a thin layer along the gel’s surface. When stimulated with light, the cells moved in multiple directions. “People hadn’t seen this muscle architecture engineered from scratch before,” Raman told MIT News. The movements were “tiny,” though, Raman said, and in her team’s new research, they aimed to maximize movements and generate enough force to move a small robot. To develop the swimming robot, Raman’s team experimented with using gelatin methacrylate instead of fibrin as a gel surface, finding it helped to grow muscles in better alignment and produce more force. “We wanted to optimize all these parameters to support live muscle cells,” Raman said.
further reading
Powered by muscle cells, a paper-thin robot swims through watery maze (MIT News)
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