The cells are activated by light and contract so the robo-stingray can swim.
This soft robotic stingray is made of rat heart muscle. Yeah, it’s just as crazy as it sounds.
“Roughly speaking, we made this thing with a pinch of rat cardiac cells, a pinch of breast implant, and a pinch of gold. That pretty much sums it up, except for the genetic engineering,” says Kit Parker, the bio-engineer at Harvard who led the team that developed the strange robot.
Parker’s robotic stingray is tiny—a bit more than half an inch long—and weighs only 10 grams. But it glides through liquid with the very same undulating motion used by fish like real stingrays and skates. The robot is powered by the contraction of 200,000 genetically engineered rat heart-muscle cells grown on the underside of the bot. Even stranger, Parker’s team developed the robot to follow bright pulses of light, allowing it to smoothly twist and turn through obstacle courses. The fascinating robot was unveiled today in the journal Science.
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The bot can swim in a liquid that has suspended nutrients in it to keep the rat heart cells fed and alive. Even after 6 weeks, the stingray bot was still swimming with over 80 percent of its cells still alive and well. “But there are definitely challenges that need to be overcome,” says Feinberg. Even with the right nutrients you wouldn’t be able to swim this bot outside of a lab, because the cells are basically defenseless to infection. “They don’t have an immune system, so it’s not protected from bacteria or fungus,” Feinberg says.
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Maybe the coolest aspect of the stingray bot is that different scientists can all learn radically different things from it. Parker says his biggest takeaway, as a researcher who hopes to engineer a fully working heart muscle, is that the robot exemplifies how certain heart-muscle can flush and flow liquid around it. “Meanwhile the roboticists and engineers can see different ways to use biological cells as building materials, and marine biologists can take a look to better understand why the muscle tissues in rays are built and organized the way they are,” he says.
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I for one welcome our new rat-cell genetically-engineered stingray overlords. https://t.co/oCW3Dxiawe via @PopMech
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) July 8, 2016
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