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MIT's Living-Muscle Robot Swims a Maze, Steered Only by Light
Key Takeaways
- MIT built a soft robot roughly the size of a stick of chewing gum powered by a single layer of living muscle cells.
- The cells are genetically engineered to contract when light hits them, so a researcher steers the robot by shining a handheld light on one fin or the other.
- Each fin measures 15 mm long, 7 mm wide and 0.5 mm thick, and the robot has no onboard electronics.
- The team replaced a wrinkling fibrin gel with a stiffer gelatin-based gel stamped with square-bottomed grooves to align the muscle fibers.
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DT Editorial Team··via newatlas.com