Living robot takes first tentative steps!

Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner of Southampton University today unveiled the first robot to be controlled by living (slime mould) cells

(Brought to you by Zeitgeist – the free Blather news service)
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The work came out of a collaboration with scientists at Kobe University in Japan, who had been studying ways of using biological cells in robots. Dr Zauner himself had been trying to use individual molecules – rather than instructions from computer programs – to control the functions and movements of robots.
“The long-term vision that I have is that this technology we’re after is going to be somewhere between living cells and molecules,” he said. “Molecules need infrastructure around them to work and so on. The cell provides that infrastructure but provides a lot more complexity.”

One small step for slime, one giant step for robotkind

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