A human-robot interaction expert said the living robots could continue to evolve and become more of an animal than a robot, leading to a new species.
A team, from the University of Vermont, Tufts University, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, built the first living robots, ‘Xenobots’, assembled from frog cells, in 2020.
The scientists have since discovered that these computer-designed and hand-assembled organisms can swim out into their dish, find single cells, gather hundreds of them together, and assemble ‘baby’ Xenobots inside their Pac-Man-shaped ‘mouth’
A few days later, these cells become new Xenobots that look, move and reproduce like the originals.
Lionel Robert, professor of information at the University of Michigan said these organic robots could continue to evolve into a new species.
“There is a lot of debate on whether Xenobots are robots; most people consider them to be some type of programmable organism.
“That being the case, they are much closer to being robots than being any type of an animal.
“I would label them as ‘organic robots’ and add that the use of them will only increase because they have the potential to address many problems.
“In the long term if these organic robots continue to evolve they may cross a line along the way and become more of an animal than a robot leading to a new species. But, we are a long way from that now.”
Joshua Bongard, PHD, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research said the team sees promise in the research for advancements toward regenerative medicine.
“The speed at which we can produce solutions matters deeply. If we can develop technologies, learning from Xenobots, where we can quickly tell the AI: ‘We need a biological tool that does X and Y and suppresses Z,’ —that could be very beneficial.
“Today, that takes an exceedingly long time. The team aims to accelerate how quickly people can go from identifying a problem to generating solutions—”like deploying living machines to pull microplastics out of waterways or build new medicines.
“We need to create technological solutions that grow at the same rate as the challenges we face.
“If we knew how to tell collections of cells to do what we wanted them to do, ultimately, that’s regenerative medicine, that’s the solution to traumatic injury, birth defects, cancer, and aging.
“All of these different problems are here because we don’t know how to predict and control what groups of cells are going to build. Xenobots are a new platform for teaching us.”
[activecampaign form=11]On its own, the Xenobot parent, made of some 3,000 cells, forms a sphere. But with an artificial intelligence program working on the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at UVM’s Vermont Advanced Computing Core, an evolutionary algorithm was able to test billions of body shapes in simulation, triangles, squares, pyramids, starfish, to find ones that allowed the cells to be more effective at the motion-based ‘kinematic’ replication reported in the new research.
Sam Kriegman, PhD, lead author on the study, said in earlier experiments, the team was amazed that Xenobots could be designed to achieve simple tasks. Now they are stunned that these biological objects, a computer-designed collection of cells, will spontaneously replicate.
“These are frog cells replicating in a way that is very different from how frogs do it. No animal or plant known to science replicates in this way.
“We asked the supercomputer at UVM to figure out how to adjust the shape of the initial parents, and the AI came up with some strange designs after months of chugging away, including one that resembled Pac-Man.
“It’s very non-intuitive. It looks very simple, but it’s not something a human engineer would come up with. Why one tiny mouth? Why not five?
“We built these Pac-Man-shaped parent Xenobots. Then those parents built children, who built grandchildren, who built great-grandchildren, who built great-great-grandchildren. In other words, the right design greatly extended the number of generations.”
The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Photo Credit – Douglas Blackiston and Sam Kriegman
