UVM and Tufts Team Builds First Living Robots

Scientists from UVM and Tufts repurposed living cells scraped from frog embryos and assembled them into entirely new life-forms. More: http://go.uvm.edu/firstrbts
 
These tiny “xenobots” can move toward a target and heal themselves after being cut.
 
“These are novel living machines,” says UVM robotics expert Joshua Bongard.
 
They’re neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal.
 
It’s a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism.

The new creatures were designed on a supercomputer at UVM, and then assembled by biologists at Tufts University.
 
Scientists think they could be useful for:
searching out radioactive contamination
gathering plastic pollution in the oceans
traveling in arteries to scrape out plaque

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