One step closer to the Terminator? Experts reveal robot with 'real muscles' strong enough to jump, swim and…
- Laboratory-grown muscle tissue has been developed to improve robot dexterity and motion
- Researchers working at ETH Zurich have demonstrated tissue-based muscle actuators that flex
- The actuators enable small robots to jump and swim, as well as walk and grasp
Flesh-covered robots that can walk, jump, swim and move among us may be closer than we think. Researchers working out of ETH Zurich have been busy developing muscle actuators from centimeter-scale living tissue. These muscle actuators are the latest in a design program, and motion has been improved over 10 times compared with previous iterations.
In designing the biohybrid robots, the researchers have found that it isn’t all about the volume of muscle tissue. How the muscle and the bone (or in this case, an “artificial scaffold”) interact is also important.
Grown from mouse muscle cells, the results are being viewed as a new way of building robots.
Biohybrid muscle
The...
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