Building a robot takes time, skill, the right materials—and sometimes some fungus.
In building a pair of new robots, Cornell researchers cultivated an unlikely component: mycelium, a fungus found on the forest floor. By harnessing the mycelium’s inherent electrical signals, the researchers found a new way to control “biohybrid” robots that could potentially respond better to their environment than purely synthetic robots.
The team’s paper was published in Scientific RobotsThe lead author is Anand Mishra, a researcher in the Organic Robotics Lab led by Rob Shepherd, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell, and the senior author of the paper.
“This paper is the first of many that will use the fungal kingdom to provide environmental sensing and command signals to robots to increase their autonomy,” Sheppard said. “By growing mycelium into the robots’ electronics, we are able to allow biohybrid machines to sense and respond to their environment. In this case, we used light as the input, but in the future it will be chemicals. The potential for future robots could be to sense the soil chemistry of row crops and decide when to add more fertilizer, for example, perhaps mitigating downstream agricultural impacts like harmful algal blooms.”
Mycelium is the underground vegetative part of mushrooms. They are able to sense chemical and biological signals and respond to a variety of inputs.
“Living systems respond to touch, light, heat, and even unknown factors,” Mishra said. “If you want to build robots of the future, how do they work in unexpected environments? We can use these living systems so that any unknown input will cause the robot to react.”
They built two biohybrid robots: one was a spider-shaped soft robot and the other was a wheeled robot.
The robots completed three experiments. In the first experiment, the robots walked and rolled separately in response to natural continuous spikes in the hyphae’s signals. The researchers then stimulated the robots with ultraviolet light, causing them to change their gait, demonstrating the hyphae’s ability to respond to its environment. In the third scenario, the researchers were able to completely override the hyphae’s native signals.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) CROPPS Science and Technology Center, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and the NSF Soil Signaling Program.
