Slime Mould Takes Siege Of Six-legged Robot

Haa - the title surely caught your attention According to a recent report at NewScientist.Com, scientists have been able to couple a photoreactive slime mold with a six-legged crawler robot. This slime ( Physarum polycephalum ) which can grow upto several metres in diameter in extremely sensitive to light. This behaviour combined with the newly donated robotic legs, makes this unit scurry and hide in cold, dark corners upon photo-stimulation.

Klaus-Peter Zauner at the University of Southampton, UK, who developed the slime-controlled bot with colleagues from Kobe University in south-central Japan, says the idea is to find simpler ways to control a robot's behaviour.

 

 

"The computers we have today are very good for what we built them for," he told New Scientist. "But, in a complex or paradoxical environment, things tend not to work out."

 

Physarum polycephalum is a large single-celled organism that responds to food sources, such as bacteria and fungi, by moving towards and engulfing it. It also moves away from light and favours humid, moist places to inhabit. The mould uses a network of tiny tubes filled with cytoplasm to both sense its environment and decide how to respond to it. Zauner's team decided to harness this simple control mechanism to direct a small six-legged (hexapod) walking bot.

 

 

Wow. I thought this stuff only happened in movies. Can you imagine a bio-computer? The processing power and data storage would be imense, if not infinite.I bet Microsoft are on the tail of this project. The slime balls.

Holy wow.. and I thought that the field of bio-robotics was still in its infancy. I just came across a person yesterday (currently visiting Singapore) who was into robotics and does some work on hive technology. I actually thought that was pretty interesting since robotics environment is currently really interested in figuring out how to make simple robots react to certain environmets and create learning robots that store learnt information in biological systems like strands of braincells. Sinilar to this I'd read a while back about scientists developing a latex that weould respond by flexing to mild electrical inputs; which enabled the scientists to create moving parts without gears and mechanical energy transfer sections on small robots. (Similar to a human muscle). Must research this some more and see how much of progress has been made so far.

That's pretty wierd. Kinda Sci-Fi. Slime? Slime on legs? Very strange.

I don't think we should continue to call it SLIME, we're going to be hurting it's poor, poor feelings.