It’s Happening: US Scientists Create Reproducing Robots!
A research team succeeded in creating robots capable of reproducing themselves. Here are the details.
Robots can do a lot these days. But now, science has achieved a previously unimaginable advancement. A team of researchers developed robots capable of reproducing themselves. These so-called “Xenobots” are made from cells of frog embryos, making them biological micro-robots. They were described as “programmable organisms” in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
How Xenobots Reproduce
The research report states that the organisms reproduce through movement:
“They find and combine building blocks to make copies of themselves.” In their study, the research team demonstrates that “cell clusters, when liberated from a developing organism, can find and combine loose cells in a way that they look and move like themselves.”
This ability doesn’t need to be specifically developed or introduced through genetic manipulation: “This form of reproduction, previously unseen in any organism, emerges spontaneously within a few days rather than evolving over millennia.”
Just Like Pac Man
The author of the research report, Dr. Sam Kriegman, emphasizes the significance of these new findings:
“These are frog cells replicating in a way that’s vastly different from how frogs do it. No animal or plant known to science replicates in this way.”
Initially, the life forms died, but after providing artificial intelligence with their new insights, the described self-replication of the Xenobots through movement was successful. Kriegman further explains: “It looks very simple, but it’s nothing a human engineer would come up with. We sent the results to Doug, and he built these Pac-Man-shaped parent Xenobots. These parents then built children, those grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on.”
The report also states that Xenobots are capable of carrying and moving things. In fact, humans can benefit from this. Because it means that robots can be used in areas like removing microplastics. So, it remains exciting.
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