When you close your eyes and imagine futuristic robots, there’s a good chance the image you’ve conjured is shiny and chrome. Maybe it’s something straight out of Cyberpunk 2077, or closer to the Boston Dynamics-style bots, complete with intimidating dance moves as they take over the world. I’ve got both good and bad news for you. The good news is that the robots are definitely coming, the bad news is that they might be made of meat. That’s if these MIT scientists have anything to say about it.
Meat robots aren’t a new concept, and both artists and scientists have been working on them for a while. The potential for biological based robotics is huge, as they’ll be more flexible and have the ability to squeeze into smaller spaces. They may even be more efficient, especially when it comes to certain tasks like moving through liquids. One of the current major hurdles stopping us from developing such tissue-based terminators is figuring out how to grow muscle that can pull in more than one direction. Until now, they just weren’t ambiturners.
Recently, researchers at MIT figured out a new method using a stamp, and has produced muscles that can flex and twitch in multiple ways. To prove it, the team produced what’s likely the first multidirectional robot powered by skeletal muscle. Sadly I don’t have a video to traumatise you, but this working robotic iris can dilate and contract, which is just the first squeeze to world domination.
“With the iris design, we believe we have demonstrated the first skeletal muscle-powered robot that generates force in more than one direction. That was uniquely enabled by this stamp approach,” says Ritu Raman, the Eugene Bell career development professor of tissue engineering in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.
The directions a muscle can move is largely dependent on the way it’s formed. Muscles in the body need to be grown in specific shapes and layouts to achieve their precise control, and lab muscles are no different. Getting tissue to grow in a lab exactly how you want it isn’t easy. The new stamp method has allowed these scientists to impress tiny paths onto the growing medium, dictating the shape of the developed tissue and being able to create complex structures allowing for multidirectional movement.
“One of the cool things about natural muscle tissues is, they don’t just point in one direction. Take for instance, the circular musculature in our iris and around our trachea. And even within our arms and legs, muscle cells don’t point straight, but at an angle,” Raman notes. “Natural muscle has multiple orientations in the tissue, but we haven’t been able to replicate that in our engineered muscles.”
The stamp itself is precisely designed and then 3D printed with tiny cell sized grooves. This is then pressed by hand into a delicate hydrogel coated with a protective protein. Researchers then seed the gel with cells that grow along the indent to develop into tissues shaped with the intended design, in this case one much like a human iris. These cells had been genetically engineered to twitch in response to pulses of light, and once grown gave the engineers the ability to control the dilation of the robotic iris.
So to recap, it’s a twitchy light sensitive little flesh robot grown in a lab. That’s only a few more irises stacked on top of each other from becoming a full fledged wiggly worm. These kinds of robots could be invaluable for underwater exploration, tub transport, or more likely, some other kind of robotic companionship. If there’s one thing that’s clear, it’s that the future of robotics is probably much grosser than you ever imagined.