First living robots that can reproduce

Now, forget about losing your job to robots, Scientists from the University of Vermont, Tufts University, and Wyss Institute Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have created Xenobots 3.0, the world's first living robots that can reproduce.

These hand assembled and computer designed organisms are capable of swimming into their tiny dish, find single cells, gather hundreds of them together, and assemble Xenobots(baby) inside their Pac-Man-Shapes mouth that a few days later, become new Xenobots that look and move just like themselves. The cycle continues in which new Xenobots find cells and build copies of themselves. These robot cells have the genome of a frog but are freed from becoming tadpoles.

These robots are less than a millimeter (0.04 inches) wide.  A Xenobot parent is made of about 3,000 cells. They can easily move toward the target and can heal themselves after being cut by researchers. They also might be able to pick up and carry medicine inside a patient body. They are a new class of human made artificial living, programmable robots. The robots were designed on a supercomputer and then assembled and tested by biologists. The cells were designed from the genome of a frog.

AI-designed (C-shaped) organisms push loose stem cells (white) into piles as they move through their environment. Credit: Douglas Blackiston and Sam Kriegman

As Pac-man-shaped Xenobot “parents” move around their environment, they collect loose stem cells in their “mouths” that, over time, aggregate to create “offspring” Xenobots that develop to look just like their creators. Credit: Doug Blackiston and Sam Kriegman

No animal or plant known to science replicates in the manner these robots replicate.

“People have thought for quite a long time that we’ve worked out all the ways that life can reproduce or replicate. But this is something that has never been observed before,” says co-author Douglas Blackiston, PhD, the senior scientist at Tufts university.

The scientists behind Xenobots participated in a live webinar on December 1, 2021 to discuss their research. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University