2024-04-18 06:19:41
At the moment it has been tested exclusively with the muscle tissues of mice. However, it could work exactly the same with human tissue
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Since ever technology has imitated nature. Planes are big birds, cars were originally horse-drawn carriages and many other obvious aspects of our daily lives are based on biological issues that the animals around us have been perfecting over millions of years of evolution. This has always been applicable to robots, which are built in our image and likeness, as is the case with humanoid robots or there are even robotic dogs with unexpected functions.
A somewhat strange development
In a article published by Advanced Intelligent Systems Members of the Massachusetts Technical Institute (MIT) have investigated how soft robotics could use components clearly inspired by animal biology. Now, it is no longer enough to just imitate nature, but this team also wanted to use parts of live muscle tissue in combination with synthetic robotic parts. They have been baptized as robots biohíbridos.
Ritu Raman, the director of the research, has pointed out that the muscle tissues of his soft robots are built through mouse cell muscle tissues which are subsequently physically integrated into the robot skeleton, where they work as actuators that move the robot when contracting. The muscles are attached to a type of spring that functions as the skeleton of the robotic system. It is not an easy job, since biological muscle tissue offers unpredictable results, but in this case it is clear that they have achieved very interesting advances.
At first, they have created very non-rigid structures in which one part is resistant in one direction and the other allows movement, thus doing something similar to how the muscle cells of human beings work.
Human muscle tissues could be used
Now, the main concern of all this is what its use could be or if It is directly ethical since, although mouse cells have also been used could have been human tissues. In principle, the research has been aimed at develop small robots that could work inside the human body in a non-invasive way in order to save the lives of people who have health problems.
Faced with the fact that, of course, they could be used human muscle tissue cells to create these robots, the reality is that it has not been like that, although it has involved the suffering of laboratory animals for this. Be that as it may, it is an investigation whose conclusions could simply remain at this point, but it is true that perhaps in the future human muscle cells could be used so that the body does not reject robotic prostheses, for example, or to create biohybrid prostheses. It’s not exactly the scope of this research, as the MIT team works on soft robots, but who knows if this could have a larger application in the future.
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