I know, I know; I've previously suggested that the ancestors of slime molds were front-loaded for multicellular life. But this was nothing like what I had in mind. A group of scientists from the UK and Japan have made the rather spidery-looking robot on the left and connected it to a slime mold, letting the single-celled organism control the movements of the robot. The slime mold isn't placed in the robot itself, which means there's no danger that the cyborg will escape and wreck havoc on nearby villages. Slime molds avoid light, and a number of sensors on top of the robot corresponds to lamps directed at the organism. When the slime mold moves to avoid the light, its movements trigger the legs of the robot to move, thus making machine and cell move in sync.

Originally, this caught my attention because of my aforementioned interest in slime molds. But after reading it, I realized that it was also a good example of biology meeting engineering. Making a robot that can move around a varied terrain is harder than most people realize – the next time you walk up the stairs, try noticing the number of muscles you have to use; lift leg, bend knee, flex foot, shift weight, etc. and imagine that you had to tell a robot all of those things you take for granted. But organisms manage to move around easily, and scientists hope that by transferring the movements of lifeforms to robots, they can one day teach the robot to move its legs without an organism to holds its hand.

(HT: Fresh Wallaby Juice)

This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2006 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Biology, Humor, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.