In a move that seems more science fiction than scientific, researchers in the US have made mini-robots that use heart cells to move. We want to know why.
What’s all this about mini robots using heart cells?
The mini robots have been created using a 3D printer at the University of Illinois and they’re actually pretty cool pieces of kit. Basically, the mini robots are a little under 1cm long and only a couple of millimetres wide. So we’re not talking super computer stuff here. They’re made out of flexible gel-like biologically inert goo called hydrogel and they’re shaped kind of like a diving board, as you can see in the pic below.
Right, but what about the heart cells? What do they do and where did they come from?
The heart, or cardiac, cells used on the mini-bots actually came from lab rats and they’re coated onto the underside of the board. This was actually done in a separate process so there are a few steps involved if you wanted to make your own 3D-printed ‘living robot’.
So what do these ‘living robots’ do? Fight crime and such?
Like we already said, they’re less than 1cm in length, so they won’t be taking to the street like RoboCop anytime soon. No, the mini-bots are still in the development stages at the moment. Thanks to their coating of rat heart cells, the bots are actually able to move without any electronics telling it what to do. When the cells beat together the leg of the mini-bot curls and then stretches out pushing the bot in a straight line.
No way. That’s actually pretty cool. But why did they come up with it in the first place if it can only move in one direction?
Well here’s what Prof Rashid Bashir, who led the research at the University of Illinois, had to say: “Our goal is to see if we can get this thing to move toward chemical gradients, so we could eventually design something that can look for a specific toxin and then try to neutralise it.”
For example, the mini-bots could be coated with a particular cell that makes them eat up different things, such as oil spills (like in that episode of Futurama). So if a spill did occur the bots could be let loose to clean up it up in half the time humans would and with very little maintenance costs.
So what’s the possibility of having my own personal ‘living’ robot in the not too distant future?
The chances of that happening are next to none. You’ve obviously watched i-Robot one too many times.
