"Our long-term vision is about building a synthetic microbiota for soft crp robot that can help with repair, energy generation or biosensing of the
environment," said Cheemeng Tan, a biomedical engineer at UC Davis. The
work was published in the journal Science Robotics.
Soft robotics uses lightweight, flexible and soft materials to create
machines that match the versatility of living things; soft robot designs
often draw inspiration from nature. Adding living cells to soft robots
brings researchers another step closer to creating biological-mechanical
hybrid machines.
"By combining our work in flexible electronics and robotic skin with
synthetic biology, we are closer to future breakthroughs like soft
biohybrid robots that can adapt their abilities to sense, feel and move
in response to changes in their environmental conditions," said Carmel
Majidi, a co-author and mechanical engineer at CMU.
The research is funded in part by NSF’s Directorate for Engineering,
which invests in studies to advance the manufacturing of cells and
cell-based products.
"Cells have many natural capabilities that hold promise for sensing,
health care, energy and other uses," said Aleksandr Simonian, an NSF
program director for the Engineering of Biomedical Systems. "NSF
supports research to understand and harness cell functions -- as well as
to reliably manufacture cells -- so in the future these biological
capabilities can be applied in many areas of the economy and make a
difference in people’s lives."
