A golden cyborg stingray has been created
Scientists have created a realistic cyborg robot. It consists of a golden "skeleton", polymer "skin" and an engine based on light-activated rat heart muscle cells. The invention is reported in the journal Science (Park et al., Phototactic guidance of a tissue-engineered soft-robotic ray).
Like a real stingray, a miniature robot consists of a flat body with long wing-shaped fins (waving them up and down, the robot floats in the water). The polymer skin of the "stingray" is fixed on a skeleton made of gold wire and is covered with about 200 thousand cardiomyocytes – heart muscle cells taken from the body of rats. The cyborg weighs only 10 grams, its length is 16 millimeters.
Kit Parker and his colleagues, bioengineers from Harvard, came up with such a system of movement: when in contact with light, muscle cells cause the fins to move down. The reverse movement is provided by the elasticity of the skeleton (the wire pushes the cyborg up when the muscle cells relax).
The stingray control system is provided by photosensitive cells. If one side of the ramp is irradiated with blue light pulses, it can be forced to turn there. Increasing the pulse frequency increases the cyborg's speed (up to a maximum of nine meters per hour). In addition, the robot has perfectly learned to bend around obstacles.
The final goal of the project is not just to create a realistic biorobot, but a more thorough understanding of the work of the heart muscle. As for robotics, the Parker stingray is unique in that its sensors are both driving mechanisms (hence its efficiency and speed).
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11.07.2016