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MIT Creates Paper-Thin Swimming Robot Powered by Living Muscle
Confirmed
In Short: MIT engineers have created a paper-thin swimming robot powered by a single layer of living muscle cells, according to a study published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.
The robot, about the size of a stick of gum, uses a gel skeleton with two halves acting as fins, each covered in a layer of muscle cells thinner than a strand of hair.
When light is shone on one fin, the muscle cells twitch, causing the fin to flap and propel the robot through water.
By alternating the light between the two fins, researchers can control the robot's direction and speed.
The robot successfully navigated a simple watery maze, following a light source held by a researcher.
"The robot's quite strong, given its size," said study author Ritu Raman, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.
"It takes a lot of force to move through water versus air," Raman added.
The team optimized the gel's stiffness and muscle cell growth to support the live muscle cells.
"We believe that biohybrid robots powered by living muscle could one day perform delicate jobs like exploring environments too fragile or unpredictable for conventional hardware," said Raman.
The robot's muscle cells were stimulated with light for 15 minutes a day at two pulses per second to maintain their function.
This design bypasses the need for thick muscle chunks, making the swimming robots thinner, more flexible, and potentially less expensive to build.
"And the cells were moving in multiple directions. But they only moved about 100 microns. From a robotics perspective, their movements were tiny," noted the MIT News.
What's confirmed
- “It takes a lot of force to move through water versus air,” says study author Ritu Raman, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.
What's still developing
- But as MIT engineers have found, even a single layer of muscle cells can power through water if designed right.
- The engineers showed that the paper-thin bot could swim and swivel through a simple watery maze.
- They found that when they deposited muscles onto each type of grooved gel, cells settled into alignment in grooves that were more square than curved.
- They made different recipes of GelMA to create skeletons of different stiffnesses and observed how muscle cells grew when deposited on the gel’s surface.
- A credit line must be used when reproducing images; if one is not provided below, credit the images to "MIT." Swimming can take a lot of muscle.
- In a paper appearing today in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, the team presents a design for a thin, muscle-powered swimming robot.
- The “skeleton” of the aquabot is made from a film of gel that is about the length and width of a stick of gum.
- Alternate the light between them, and the robot turns as well as moves forward without the need for onboard electronics, so all the steering happens from outside the dish.
- Getting such a thin sheet of muscle to move a robot required the researchers to solve a problem left by an earlier experiment.
- Turning those tiny motions into swimming required the muscle cells to generate more useful force without abandoning the thin architecture.
- Engineers trying to build machines soft enough for these environments often turn to living tissue, constructing biohybrid machines powered by chunks of lab-grown skeletal muscle.
- These biological engines require millions of cells to fabricate, making the resulting swimming robots bulky and expensive to build.