In a groundbreaking achievement, researchers have engineered two robots controlled by king oyster mushrooms. The team, led by Cornell University’s Organic Robotics Lab, grew the fungi’s mycelium into the robot’s hardware, allowing it to sense and respond to its environment using electrical signals generated by the fungus.
The robots, which can walk and roll, were able to change their gait and trajectory in response to light stimulation. The researchers hope that this biohybrid technology could one day be used for applications such as monitoring oceans or exploring earthquake debris with cyborg cockroaches.
The study’s lead author, Anand Mishra, engineered an electrical interface that accurately reads the mycelia’s raw electrical activity and processes it into digital information to activate the robot’s actuators. The team overcame challenges in detecting and using the small electrical signals from the mycelia, making it a remarkable achievement.
The potential applications of this technology are vast, with possibilities ranging from agriculture to ocean monitoring. As the field of biohybrid robotics continues to advance, we may see more robots that combine biological and synthetic components to create partly living and partly engineered entities.
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/04/science/fungus-robot-mushroom-biohybrid/index.html