Scientists create new ‘living Robots’ that have memory and are able to assemble themselves

Scientists have created new living robots that have memory and are able to assemble themselves. The “Xenobots” are an updated version of biological machines that were first unveiled in 2019. Xenobots were made out of the cells of frogs by scientists from Tufts University and the University of Vermont in United States. Xenobots could conduct a host of tasks and actions, including moving themselves and other things around and demonstrating collective behavior as part of a swarm of such robots.

The new version include a vast array of upgrades. Xenobots are able to assemble into a body from a host of single cells, do not need muscle cells to move around, and have a memory that can be used to record things that happen to them. Xenobots are also faster and more capable than the first version, and have a longer lifespan. Xenobots can still work together as a collective and heal themselves.

Xenobots could be further upgraded to add a host of other capabilities that could be used to improve the environment or in healthcare. But Xenobots also could help shed light on how exactly cells such as those that make up a human come together to form a whole that works as a system. That could help researchers understand how single-celled organisms turned into the complex organisms that surround us.

The processes that help form the Xenobots could tell reserachers how humans were formed and gained capabilities such as being able to process information and understand things.

The work on the new Xenobots is described in a paper published in the journal Science Robotics. Xenobots were built a little differently from the original versions. The researchers took stem cells from frog embryos and allowed them to begin assembling themselves, as they would when the frog grows, forming into tiny balls with cilia that can be controlled by the organism.

In a frog or human, those cilia would be found in places like the lungs, where they help push out harmful material. But the researchers were able to use them for an entirely different purpose, essentially reprogramming the Xenobot so that the cilia were used like tiny legs, to move around. The researchers are witnessing the remarkable plasticity of cellular collectives, which build a rudimentary new body that is quite distinct from their default, despite having a completely normal genome.

In a frog embryo, cells cooperate to create a tadpole. In this case, the researchers see that cells can re-purpose their genetically encoded hardware, like cilia, for new functions such as locomotion. It is amazing that cells can spontaneously take on new roles and create new body plans and behaviors without long periods of evolutionary selection for those features.

Researchers say the process is not dissimilar from the normal way of creating a robot, but just uses biological tissue to do so.

In a way, the Xenobots are constructed much like a traditional robot, only the researchers use cells and tissues rather than artificial components to build the shape and create predictable behavior. On the biology end, this approach is helping the researchers understand how cells communicate as they interact with one another during development, and how they might better control those interactions. At the same time, scientists from the University of Vermont were running computer simulations of Xenobots working both together and apart to find how their shapes changed their behaviors.

Those could then be used to select for specific behavior, such as gathering pieces of debris from within a set of particles. It is not at all obvious what a successful design should look like, that is where the supercomputer comes in and searches over the space of all possible Xenobot swarms to find the swarm that does the job best. The researchers want Xenobots to do useful work.

Right now the researchers are giving Xenobots simple tasks, but ultimately they are aiming for a new kind of living tool that could, for example, clean up microplastics in the ocean or contaminants in soil.