Researchers from the University of Vermont, Tufts University and Harvard's Wyss Institute published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Tuesday describing how Xenobot, the world's first biological robot, reproduces itself.
Unlike robots made of materials such as metal and plastic, Xenobot is not mechanical, but tiny biobots less than 1mm, much larger than microbes. According to corresponding author Joshua Bonga, they are neither a traditional robot nor a known species on Earth, but a living, programmable organism.
"People have always philosophized about this, but now you can experiment to create biological machines, or machines that make living things, and living things in turn create machines," said Bongard, a senior author and computer scientist at the University of Vermont.
It's ok to be confused. Researchers casually refer to the Xenobot as a "machine," but the Xenobot doesn't actually contain any mechanical components. Science may be moving faster than the framework within which we talk or even think about this new category of machine life. "I think it makes us realize that there may not be a clear dividing line between a machine and an organism," Bongard said.
Xenobot was first launched in January 2020. Researchers at the University of Vermont and Tufts University have built the world's first living robot, dubbed Xenobot, using an evolutionary algorithm that uses skin cells and heart muscle cells from African clawed frogs.
As Xenobot is synthesized by animal cells, it has a variety of life characteristics of natural life, such as being able to move in water medium, self-biodegradation, self-repair ability, and automatic healing after being cut open.
In March, Xenobot 2.0, a living robot capable of self-propelling using hair-like cilia "legs" to move quickly across a surface, was unveiled. In addition, it has the ability to record information. But they, like last year's 1.0 version, cannot replicate themselves.
This time, the research team announced that they had built the first living robots that could replicate themselves.
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