Scientists Create "Xenobot" Living Robots, "Neither a Traditional Robot Nor a Known Species"

Designed by an evolutionary algorithm running on a supercomputer the "xenobots" could prove useful in areas off-limits to mechanical robots.

Gareth Halfacree
4 years agoRobotics

A team of scientists from the University of Vermont and Tufts University have designed "living robots," dubbed "xenobots," capable — in the lab, at least — of moving towards a target to deliver a payload, and potentially of use in areas where mechanical robots should fear to tread.

"These are novel living machines," claims Joshua Bongard, computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont, who co-led the research project that produced the xenobots using an evolutionary algorithm on a supercomputer system — producing random configurations of up to 1,000 skin and heart cells over 100 generations. "They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It's a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism."

"We can imagine many useful applications of these living robots that other machines can't do," adds co-leader Michael Levin, who directs the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology at Tufts University, "like searching out nasty compounds or radioactive contamination, gathering microplastic in the oceans, travelling in arteries to scrape out plaque.

"The big question in biology is to understand the algorithms that determine form and function. The genome encodes proteins, but transformative applications await our discovery of how that hardware enables cells to cooperate toward making functional anatomies under very different conditions."

"If humanity is going to survive into the future, we need to better understand how complex properties, somehow, emerge from simple rules," Levin continues. "[We focused on] controlling the low-level rules. We also need to understand the high-level rules. If you wanted an anthill with two chimneys instead of one, how do you modify the ants? We'd have no idea.

"I think it's an absolute necessity for society going forward to get a better handle on systems where the outcome is very complex," concludes Levin. "A first step towards doing that is to explore: how do living systems decide what an overall behaviour should be and how do we manipulate the pieces to get the behaviours we want?"

The team's research has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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