That’s right. Shrooms. Okay, not Magic Mushrooms. But still. Mushrooms powering robots? Yup.
Researchers at Cornell University created a “biohybrid” robot powered by signals from king oyster mushrooms. According to the scientists, king oyster mushrooms are easy to grow and maintain, making them ideal for use in robots.
To get things started, the researchers cultivated the fungi and guided its mycelia to grow onto a 3D-printed scaffold full of electrodes. Mycelia is the network of strands that connect mushrooms underground and allows them to communicate.
The interconnected mycelia respond to environmental changes with electrical impulses, much like the electrical impulses given off by neurons in your brains to communicate with each other. These impulses communicate with a computer interface. The computer then converts the impulses into digital commands and transmits them to the robot’s motors and valves. The result? The robot moves.
The researchers suggested that the mushroom robots could be used in agriculture for detecting chemical contaminants, poisons, or pathogens in crop fields better than synthetic robots. And fungi can handle extreme conditions. They can survive in very salty water, severe cold, and hazardous radiation, making them more useful than animal or plant biohybrid robots.
The researchers noted that fungi are everywhere, and creating these types of robots could be more feasible in areas with fewer resources. “That means you could potentially send a very small [amount] of mycelium to a very remote destination where you then grow up the mycelium and can build robots there—so there could be applications in space robotics,” commented Vickie Webster-Wood, engineer at Carnegie Mellon University.
And once the robot mission is over, less cleanup is needed, and the risk of residual pollutants is lower.
All things considered, “biohybrid robotics” — a relatively new field that combines plant, animal, and fungal cells with synthetic materials to create robots — may well be the future of the robot industry.