A new robot has been created by a team led by Harvard bioengineer, Kit Palmer, that is not like the usual type of robot you hear about. This one has been made using a pinch of rat cardiac cells, a pinch of breast implant, and a pinch of gold according to the team and they are describing it as some kind of biological life-form. It is also in the form of a stingray.
The tiny little Stingray measures just over one, and a half inches long weighs 10 grams and has 200,000 genetically engineered rat heart muscle cells on its underside that allows the robot to move. With the use of living cells, the team found they were able to replicate the real movement of a stingray much easier than you could with any other material and saw the robot glide through the water with ease.
There are four layers of material that make up the Stingray robot. The top is made of a silicone material that allows flexibility while holding the whole piece together. The second layer is made of gold and is a skeleton that will allow the fins to bounce back once finished undulating. The third layer consists of another layer of silicone that separates the heart muscle from the gold. It also plays the role of allowing the rat cells to be grown exactly as they need them as is cast with a particular pattern. Then, lastly, the living mice cells are positioned and layered on the underside of the robot that sends signals to adjacent cells to create a contraction that moves the fins in the same way as a real stingray.
However, the stingray’s fins will only contract when flashed by a specific wavelength of light, through the use if optogenetics. Depending on where the fins are flashed by the light, depends on what direction the robot moves. This is pretty exciting stuff, but there are limitations. Currently, this experiment is only that – an experiment. Because the cells do not have an immune system, they would not be protected against any bacteria or fungus and would simply not survive outside a testing facility. But, there is still much to be learned from the experiment and many different fields will benefit from the research carried out including roboticists, engineers, and marine biologists.
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