Scientists who created the first living robots have revealed that the organisms, known as xenobots, can now reproduce, according to their study.
Created using stem cells from the African Clawed Frog (Xenopus laevis), xenobots are less than one millimetre wide and can move, work together as a group and even self-heal.
But now, the scientists who developed them have found they can reproduce in an entirely new way – completely different from the biological reproduction of any living plant or animal.
“I was astounded by it,” professor of biology and director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, Michael Levin said, as reported by CNN.
This new form of reproduction sees the xenobots effectively harvest loose stem cells, gathering them together into piles which can then mature into xenobots.
Image Credit: Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms research article
“Frogs have a way of reproducing that they normally use,” Levin said. “But when you … liberate [the cells] from the rest of the embryo and you give them a chance to figure out how to be in a new environment, not only do they figure out a new way to move, but they also figure out apparently a new way to reproduce.”
However, they soon discovered that replication happened rarely with the original, spherical-shaped xenobots. And only under specific circumstances. The bots used a process known as kinetic replication – known to occur at a molecular level but never seen on this scale, using entire cells or organisms.
After realising the xenobots shape was hindering them, researchers used AI to test a variety of new body shapes to maximise the stem cell harvesting process. The AI settled on a C-shape which resembles iconic gaming character, Pac-Man.
“The AI didn’t program these machines in the way we usually think about writing code. It shaped and sculpted and came up with this Pac-Man shape,” lead author of the study, Josh Bongard said – a computer science professor and robotics expert at the University of Vermont. “The shape is, in essence, the program. The shape influences how the xenobots behave to amplify this incredibly surprising process.”