Researchers at the University of Tokyo have created a bipedal biohybrid robot that combines artificial bones with biological muscles capable of walking and spinning underwater. A typical biohybrid robot can move in a straight line or make large turns, but it is difficult to perform more refined movements in a smaller space. This makes them unsuitable for use in areas with many obstacles, such as search and rescue operations.
The new robot can be turned on one foot, allowing it to turn in a small circle. Currently, it can only work underwater, as lab-grown muscles dry out quickly when exposed to air, losing their potency. However, the researchers anticipate that it is possible to create future iterations that can walk on land by using thicker muscles and their own nutrients**, and possibly covering them with artificial **.
If I were to ask you to imagine a robot made of living muscles on artificial bones, you might think of a half-human, half-machine robot striding in stride. But the truth is that we're still only a small step in creating bio-hybrid, natural artificial robots.
Building a real-life biohybrid robot that can walk like a human is a huge challenge, let alone stride or run like a human. Professor Shoji Takeuchi and his team at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Information Science tackled this challenge in their latest research.
By incorporating living tissue as part of the robot, we can harness the superior capabilities of living organisms. In our latest study, we combined lab-grown skeletal muscle tissue with flexible prosthetic legs and 3D-printed feet. Using musculature to move the legs allowed us to create a small robot with efficient, quiet movement and a soft touch. Takeuchi explains.
The researchers first cultivated skeletal muscle in molds to make bands. When muscle tissue becomes too dry, it loses the ability to move, so the robot is designed to be suspended in water. The team made a lightweight skeleton out of floating styrene sheets, a flexible silicon-based body, acrylic legs with brass wire counterweights, and 3D-printed feet. Two pieces of musculature are attached from the body to the robot's feet to form the legs.
Each leg is stimulated with hand-held gold electrodes to transfer an electrical charge, similar to how your brain sends electrical signals to your body to move. When the legs are stimulated one after the other, this causes the muscle tissue to contract and the robot "walks".
By stimulating each leg at five-second intervals, they were able to achieve a rate of 54 mm speed mobile robot. Although it doesn't seem particularly fast, its leg movements are on par with other biohybrid robots.
Initially, we weren't sure if we could walk on two legs at all, so we were really surprised when we succeeded," says Takeuchi.
Our biohybrid robot successfully performs forward and turning movements by walking bipedally by effectively balancing four key forces: muscle contraction, the restoring force of a flexible body, the force of gravity acting on weight, and the buoyancy of the float. ”
The team is currently considering how to create a smoother-moving robot that can walk on land by developing ways to remotely stimulate muscles and create thicker muscles and provide nutrients to maintain them.
"We are working on designing robots with joints and additional musculature to achieve more complex walking capabilities," Takeuchi said. Our findings provide valuable insights into the development of soft and flexible robots driven by muscle tissue and have the potential to contribute to a deeper understanding of biological locomotion mechanisms, further enabling us to mimic the complexity of human walking in robots. ”
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