British scientists use mould to create biological robot
Slime mould usually gets a bad rap but this protist is a star player in the scientific world. British researchers have announced they will use slime mould to design the first ever biological robot: a development that will impact the field of computational robotics. The scientists from the University of the West of England (UWE) Bristol presented 'plasmobot', an amorphous, non-silicon biological robot. The key ingredient in their design was plasmodium, which is the vegetative stage of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum that is commonly found in forests and gardens in the UK. Project leader Andy Adamatzky of the Department of Computer Science at UWE Bristol said the team's previous work proved how mould is capable of having computational skills. 'Most people's idea of a computer is a piece of hardware with software designed to carry out specific tasks. This mould, or plasmodium, is a naturally occurring substance with its own embedded intelligence,' he explained. 'It propagates and searches for sources of nutrients and when it finds such sources it branches out in a series of veins of protoplasm,' Professor Adamatzky added. 'The plasmodium is capable of solving complex computational tasks, such as the shortest path between points and other logical calculations.' The team succeeded in making the mould transport objects in previous experiments, he said. 'By feeding it oat flakes, it grows tubes which oscillate and make it move in a certain direction carrying objects with it,' Professor Adamatzy said. 'We can also use light or chemical stimuli to make it grow in a certain direction.' The plasmobot could sense and span objects, and transport small objects along pre-programmed directions, according to the UWE researcher. 'The robots will have parallel inputs and outputs, a network of sensors and the number of crunching power of super computers,' he said. 'The plasmobot will be controlled by spatial gradients of light, electro-magnetic fields and the characteristics of the substrate on which it is placed.' Professor Adamatzy pointed out that the plasmobot will be a 'fully controllable and programmable amorphous intelligent robot with an embedded massively parallel computer'. This latest development will clear the path for the team to conduct further experiments on how mould can be controlled and used for its computational abilities. 'We are at the very early stages of our understanding of how the potential of the plasmodium can be applied, but in years to come we may be able to use the ability of the mould for example to deliver a small quantity of a chemical substance to a target, using light to help to propel it, or the movement could be used to help assemble micro-components of machines,' Professor Adamatzky remarked. The next development would be to harness the power of plasmodia within the human body. The delivery of drugs to certain parts of the body is an example. 'It might also be possible for thousands of tiny computers made of plasmodia to live on our skin and carry out routine tasks freeing up our brain for other things,' Professor Adamatzy surmised. 'Many scientists see this as a potential development of amorphous computing, but it purely theoretical at the moment.'
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