Cornell University Make A Robot That Can Eat And Grow

The robotics field is advancing fast thanks to sensor and machine learning technology. Whenever a new generation of robots is announced, we will have the chance to see a smarter model and a more complicated mechanism. What we are having in our mind now is a robot assembled from thousands of smaller pieces but what if each of us can grow our own?

Experts from Cornell University have come up with machines making up of DNA-like materials. They can move from one place to another, consume resources, generate energy, grow, evolve, and die.

That many abilities might seem like the robots are getting more like a human being, but Dan Luo, a professor in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University, thought otherwise. He said that the robots ran on their manmade metabolism. They were not alive like us, but instead, they came closer to how we operate, in other words, they were more lifelike.

He then elaborated further what he meant by “lifelike.” The robots’ system would be as complicated as what we saw on mold. The team combined an irreversible biosynthesis with dissipative assembly processes. The structures can move like the way slime mold does as the ability was programmed with the material made up the robots.

With the new abilities, these structures promise a few new practical applications. Some of them are hybrid nanomaterials and pathogen detection. A manmade system that can evolve and sustain itself has been a wild ambition of scientists for a long time, but this new invention, that goal is finally feasible.

Boiling this achievement down to the most basic, what Cornell experts did was to make material from DNA, observe them when they consume, produce power, grow, and race. What they did was impressive but that it was just getting started. The team is working to make machines capable of reproducing.

We see the work at its infancy stage, but it can pave the way for a wealth of applications. A lifelike robot has been stirring debate for a while now and that discussion would get a lot more intensive.