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Pac-Man-shaped blobs become world's first self-replicating biological robots - Livescience.com

Pac-Man-shaped blobs become world's first self-replicating biological robots - Livescience.com

Pac-Man-shaped blobs become world's first self-replicating biological robots - Livescience.com
Dec 02, 2021 1 min, 32 secs

In action, the bots (dubbed "xenobots" by their inventors), even look like Pac-Man.

The bots are made from stem cells taken from frog eggs and are 0.04 inches (1 millimeter) wide or less.

"They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal," Bongard said in a statement when the invention of xenobots was first announced in 2020, Live Science reported at the time.

Biological robots are promising, Kriegman said, because they can self-repair.

In their typical spherical shape, the xenobots are capable of a limited version of self-replication, the researchers found.

When put in a dish full of independently floating frog stem cells, the blobs circle merrily, randomly pushing the free-floating cells into clumps, some of which stick together to form new xenobots.

After computer simulations suggested that a Pac-Man shape might be more effective, the researchers tested these C-shaped xenobots in a soup of stem cells.

They found that the diameter of the offspring of Pac-Man xenobots was 149% larger than the offspring of spherical xenobots.

Thanks to the size improvements, the baby xenobots were able to create their own offspring.

The system is still quite fragile, and the process of growing the cells and making sure their growth substrate is clean and fresh is tedious, Kriegman said.

Their AI simulation also suggested that varying the shape of the lab dishes the xenobots replicate in might lead to better results, but that still needs to be tested in the real world. 

However, there are lessons from the xenobots that could be incorporated into robotics right away, Kriegman said

Biological organisms are smart all the way down to their component parts, he said: Organisms are made of self-organizing cells, which are made of self-organizing organelles, which are made of self-assembling proteins and molecules

"If we could build robots out of intelligent modules, maybe we could create more robust machines," Kriegman said

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