The scientists that created the world's first living robot, called Xenobots, have found a way to make them on their own.
The stem cells of the Xenopus laevis are used to create the Xenobots, which are made from the cells of the petri dish. The term "robots" is used to refer to any machine that does "physical, useful work" in the world, according to Sam Kriegman.
The University of Vermont, the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and Harvard University collaborated with Kriegman on the project.
One of the things that we came up with was to clean up the dish, because we tried to figure out what useful work they could do.
The researchers placed dye particles and iron beads in a petri dish and watched the little Xenobots pile up the debris. He described the Xenobots as bulldozers that push stem cells into piles.
Douglas Blackiston placed additional cells that were the same kind as the Xenobots to see how the bots would react.
I said, 'Oh my God, that's amazing.' When they make the piles, what happens? What happens to the cells when they're piled up? We didn't know. We found out by letting the piles develop over the course of a few days, and then bringing them into a new dish to see if they can move.
It turns out that is possible.
The piles were going to become "offspring" of the stem cells, growing their own cilia and operating on their own.
Stem cells will compact in a sphere if there's enough of them in a pile. "They grow cilia, and that allows them to move, and in some cases, also make additional piles, and those piles become their offspring."
Researchers used artificial intelligence to figure out the best shape for the Xenobots to replicate on a more consistent basis to have better control.
"We built a model that mimics the stem cells and everything inside of the computer," he said.
They discovered that a "Pac-Man" shape yielded the best results to ensure the Xenobots were able to create more, thus engineering the shape of the actual Xenobots into the more efficient form.
The design is at least two to three times better than the natural state. They created children that became great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. Four rounds of copying the 'Pac-Man' design.
The project could give insight into how some animals can regenerate lost parts while others cannot, like how humans are able to regenerate parts of their liver, but salamanders can regenerate.
He said that the next step for the Xenobots would be to give them some sort of sensory organs.
He said that they're swimming around with their eyes closed. "They're just balls of power."
