Artificial Life
Scientists have created a bio-robotic version of a stingray that's powered and guided by light-sensitive rat heart cells. The work demonstrates a new method for building bio-inspired robots with tissue engineering technology.
Scientists have created a bio-robotic mimic of a stingray powered and guided by light-sensitive rat heart cells.
The work, published in the journal, Science, demonstrates a new method for building bio-inspired robots using tissue engineering. Batoid fish, which include stingrays, are by their flat bodies and long, wing-like fins that extend from their heads. These fins move in energy-efficient waves that emulate from the front of the fin to the back, allowing batoids to glide gracefully through water. Inspired by this design, Sung-Jin Park and fellow researchers endeavored to build a miniature, soft tissue robot with similar qualities and efficiency.
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"I want to build an artificial heart, but you're not going to go from zero to a whole heart overnight," says Kit Parker, a bioengineer and physicist at Harvard University's Wyss Institute. "This is a training exercise."They created neutrally charged gold skeletons that mimic the stingray's shape, which were overlaid with a thin layer of stretchy polymer. Along the top of the robotic ray, the researchers strategically aligned rat cardiomyocytes, heart muscle cells. The cardiomyocytes, when stimulated, contract the fins downward.
Asymmetrical pulses of light can be used to turn the robot to the left or right, the researchers showed, and different frequencies of light can be used to control its speed, as demonstrated in a series of videos.
"We want to make sure we think about the ethical issues hand in hand with just asking what we can do"
"You have one group standing up and then the next and then the next. Well, in the case of the muscle here, they're doing the same thing,"says John Dabiri, a professor of engineering at Stanford who worked with Parker on the artificial jellyfish. "They're able to get a certain section of muscle to contract and then the next and then the next."The method works well enough to guide the bio-robot through a basic obstacle course. The robotic stingray, containing roughly 200,000 cardiomyocytes, is 16 millimeters long and weighs just 10 grams.
The artificial ray isn't really an organism. It can't grow, adapt or reproduce. But scientists should be considering the possibilities as they pursue other projects like this, the researchers say.
"We want to make sure we think about the ethical issues hand in hand with just asking what we can do," Dabiri says.
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