… and cyborg cockroaches …

Robot controlled by a king oyster mushroom blends living organisms and machines
Accuweather| September 04, 2024 | Katie Hunt

By growing the mushroom’s mycelium into the robot’s hardware, researchers have engineered two types of robots that sense and respond to the environment by harnessing electrical signals made by the fungus.

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A wheeled bot rolls across the floor. A soft-bodied robotic star bends its five legs, moving with an awkward shuffle.

Powered by conventional electricity via plug or battery, these simple robotic creations would be unremarkable, but what sets these two robots apart is that they are controlled by a living entity: a king oyster mushroom.

By growing the mushroom’s mycelium, or rootlike threads, into the robot’s hardware, a team led by Cornell University researchers has engineered two types of robots that sense and respond to the environment by harnessing electrical signals made by the fungus and its sensitivity to light.

The robots are the latest accomplishment of scientists in a field known as biohybrid robotics who seek to combine biological, living materials such as plant and animal cells or insects with synthetic components to make partly living and partly engineered entities.

Biohybrid robots have yet to venture beyond the lab, but researchers hope one day robot jellyfish may explore oceans, sperm-powered bots may be able to deliver fertility treatments and cyborg cockroaches could search for survivors in the wake of an earthquake.

“Mechanisms, including computing, understanding and action as a response, are done in the biological world and in the artificial world that humans have created, and biology most of the time is better at it than our artificial systems are,” said Robert Shepherd, a senior author of a study detailing the robots published August 28 in the journal Science Robotics.

“Biohybridization is an attempt to find components in the biological world that we can harness, understand, and control to help our artificial systems work better,” added Shepherd, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University who leads the institution’s Organic Robotics Lab.

Part fungus, part machine

The team began by growing king oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus eryngii) in the lab from a simple kit ordered online. The researchers chose this species of mushroom because it grows easily and quickly.

They cultivated the mushroom’s threadlike structures or mycelium, which can form networks that, according to the study, can sense, communicate and transport nutrients — functioning a little like neurons in a brain. (Alas, it’s not strictly accurate to call the creations shroom bots. The mushroom is the fruit of the fungi — the robots are powered by the rootlike mycelium.)

Mycelium produces small electrical signals and can be connected to electrodes.

Andrew Adamatzky, a professor of unconventional computing at the University of the West of England in Bristol who builds fungal computers, said it isn’t clear how fungi produce electrical signals.

“No one knows for sure,” said Adamatzky, who wasn’t involved in the research but reviewed it before publication.