Watch: A robotic finger uses its lab-grown muscles to lift an object
Watch: A robotic finger uses its lab-grown muscles to
lift an object
By Echo Huang May 31, 2018
Metal robot arms can help us assemble cars and make
cocktails, but they don’t yet have the flexibility of human arms, hands, and
fingers. Advances in “biohybrid” robotics, which combine biological elements
with mechanical ones, are paving the way for machines that will move a lot more
like humans one day.
Robotics researchers at the University of Tokyo’s
Institute of Industrial Science, for example, have managed to graft living
muscle onto an artificial fingerbone, allowing a robotic finger to pick up and
drop a ring—a task that looks easy but is actually a complicated dance of joint
movements, muscle control, and neural signals. Their research, published in
Science Robotics on Wednesday (May 30), detailed the process, which involved
growing muscles from primitive muscle cells.
The lab-grown muscles had the ability to contract, and
allowed the rotation of a robotic joint in two directions. The biohybrid robot
could pick up the ring thanks to its antagonistic muscle pairs (think triceps
and biceps, when one relaxes, the other contracts, to make a movement), which
allowed them to work in opposition to one another.
China Xinhua News
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Japanese engineers
integrate living muscles into robots.
The robots can mimic actions of human finger
http://xhne.ws/fuOl5
(Video courtesy of 2018 Shoji Takeuchi, Institute of
Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo)
12:02 PM - May 30, 2018
Electric currents contracted the muscles on one side of
the robotic finger to allow it to pick up and carry the ring, while stimulation
of the muscle on the other side of the finger allowed it to put it down. Two
biohybrid robots also worked together to pick up a square frame, demonstrating
a 90° joint rotation, a similar range of motion to that of living skeleton
muscle, noted the study.
The structure they created resembles the muscles in a
human being’s forearm, said Shoji Takeuchi, an author of the report and a
mechanical engineer at the University of Tokyo. Takeuchi also noted that the
muscles they created in this experiment were able to be used for up to a week,
while in earlier experiments, cultivated muscles shrank quickly and were no
longer usable. For now, the muscles can only survive in water, but electrically
stimulating the muscles produces bubbles that degrade the tissues. The
researchers hope to solve the problem by building motor neurons into the
muscles.
A future application of their work might be to help
scientists test drugs on lab-grown muscles instead of living animals, Takeuchi
said. Another ambitious future application would be building a real biohybrid
robot.
“The first primary motivation to make a biohybrid robot
is kind of the scientific fiction,” Takeuchi said, adding that the dream is to
“make a real robot… behave like a real living body.”
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