Robots Under Mushrooms: When Mushroom Mycelium Becomes a Sensory Organ
To create a robot, you will need time, engineering skills, the right materials, and sometimes a little mushroom. It is the mushrooms that are considered as a specific “sense organ” that will be built into the robot to transmit data about the environment.
Hybrid technologies are becoming more and more common in our wonderful world. Here is a great example of how you can raise the north with neural networks using grown brain fragments. At the same time, the very concept of intelligence as a single property of humanity is collapsing, and there are a great many forms of intelligence. It's time to take the next step.
Mycelium and robots
To create the new robots, Cornell University researchers grew and integrated into the mechanism an unusual component found in forest soil: mushroom mycelium.
By harnessing the innate electrical signals of mycelium, researchers have discovered a new way to control “biohybrid” robots that could potentially respond to their environment better than their synthetic counterparts.
Article published in the journal Science RoboticsThe lead author is Anand Mishra, a research scientist in the Organic Robotics Lab led by Rob Shepard, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University, and the senior author of the paper.
This work is the first of many that will explore the fungal kingdom to provide environmental signals to robots to increase their autonomy. By growing mycelium in the robot’s electronics, we were able to enable the biohybrid machine to sense and respond to its environment. In the first experiments, we used light as an input, but in the future, it will be chemicals. The potential for future robots to detect the chemical composition of the soil in row crops and decide when to apply more fertilizer, mitigating the impact of agriculture is valuable.
Rob Shepherd, senior author of the study
Results
Mycelium is the underground vegetative part of fungi. Its essence is to perceive chemical and biological signals and react to many factors. This contributes to both the absorption and transportation of nutrients, and the release of dangerous chemicals when meeting an enemy or competitive mycelium. Despite the fact that for humans, the mycelium of some mushrooms very interesting.
Living systems respond to touch, they respond to light, they respond to heat, they even respond to some unknown things like chemical signals. If you want to create robots of the future, you have to give them the ability to work in unexpected conditions. We can use these living systems, and any unknown data packet the robot will respond to accordingly.
Anand Mishra, lead author of the study
Two models of biohybrid robots were built: a soft spider-shaped robot and a wheeled bot. Both models went through three phases of testing. In the first phase, the robots moved in response to the mycelium's natural, continuous bursts of signals.
In the second phase, the researchers stimulated the robots with ultraviolet light, which caused them to change routes, demonstrating the ability of the mycelium to respond and be controlled by human-dependent factors.
In the third scenario, the researchers managed to completely suppress the mycelium's own signal by directing the robots along routes that were designed in advance.
What will happen in the end? One option is that agricultural technologies will be used more flexibly. However, it may also be that such a robot, connected to a neural network cluster, using more available signals, will become a new species on the planet. And who knows how incredible the next stage of symbiosis will be.
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