The world's first living reproductive robot is born: AI participated in the design and has reproduced for 4 generations

You may have heard of manufacturing robots, assembly robots, and 3D printing robots, but have you heard of "breeding robots"?

In order to survive, life must reproduce. Over billions of years, organisms on Earth have evolved a variety of ways to reproduce, and now robots can also replicate themselves and reproduce offspring.

Recently, research teams from the University of Vermont, Tufts University and Harvard University in the United States have developed the first self-reproducing living robot in history. They look like the 1980s video game "Pac-Man" and can "eat" other cells while replicating themselves!

The related research paper, titled "Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms", has been published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to the paper, this creative discovery is expected to provide more direct and personalized drug treatments for trauma, congenital defects, cancer, aging, etc. in the future.

The world's first living robot

In your opinion, what should a robot look like?

Is that so?

Like this?

Still like this?

But in fact, robots can also be like this.

This is the world's first living robot "Xenobot".

It can be said that it completely breaks people's inherent impression of robots. Xenobot is not made of metal or any soft "inanimate" material, but a living robot extracted from biological cells and designed by computer.

So, how was it created?

Since the dawn of agriculture, humans have been trying to understand other organisms for their own benefit, and now that gene editing is becoming more common, scientists have tried to assemble some artificial organisms that replicate the physical form of known animals.

In this study, the team wondered: Can we use computer technology, based on robots, to completely create a completely new organism from start to finish?

Therefore, the research team selected a cell cluster composed of cardiomyocytes and skin cells differentiated from African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) embryonic stem cells as the initial organism, in which the cardiomyocytes provide power for the movement of the cell cluster, while the skin cells provide structural support.

They spent months using evolutionary algorithms to finally find the best design for the new life forms on the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at the University of Vermont's Vermont Advanced Computing Core, and gave them the ability to complete specific tasks, such as moving in one direction and carrying objects.

Figure | Computers use a combination of two types of cells to form a new living robot "Xenobot" (Source: This paper)

However, the researchers also said that this "new living, programmable organism" is still in its early stages. One important problem is that cell clusters cannot replicate themselves. Once their own energy is exhausted, they will "die" and be degraded.

Reproduction? No problem for Pac-Man!

Virtually all living things reproduce by growing and then producing offspring.

Replication has evolved into many different forms: fission, spore formation, asexual reproduction, sexual reproduction, hermaphroditism, and viral reproduction, but these different processes have one thing in common: they all take place inside an organism.

But for Xenobots, scientists believe that the best way to replicate is to continuously "eat" new cells outside the body.

In the experiment, the researchers placed Xenobots containing 3,000 cells in a culture dish. The cilia on the surface of these cell clusters then acted like bacterial flagella, driving them to swim in a spiral in the designed direction.

Surprisingly, during this process, they push the stem cells distributed everywhere and gather them together. The accumulated cells continue to increase, and within only 5 days, they can form a new cell cluster that is smaller and more spherical than the first generation - the second generation Xenobot.

However, such reproduction can only last for 1-2 generations.

So, how can we extend the number of generations?

The researchers thought of artificial intelligence. Through an artificial intelligence program running on the Deep Green supercomputer cluster, the evolutionary algorithm tested billions of cell morphologies in simulation experiments. But in the end, the artificial intelligence "wracked its brains" and got an optimal design similar to Pac-Man.

After constructing a new mother Xenobot based on this form, the researchers conducted another experiment and found that these robots were constantly moving, and new "offspring" were constantly being replicated in their C-shaped "mouths".

In the end, they were able to reproduce up to 4 generations, and the diameter of their "offspring" was about 50% larger than that of the spherical Xenobot's offspring!

In other words, the artificial intelligence algorithm finally found the right design, which greatly extended the number of generations of reproduction and replication. As Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and roboticist at the University of Vermont who co-led the study, said: "With the right design, Xenobot 3.0 is fully capable of spontaneously replicating itself."

The world's first case, joy or sorrow?

"It's astounding," said Michael Levin, a professor of biology and another leader of the team. "These cells have the genome of a frog, but instead of turning into tadpoles, they have this extraordinary plasticity that replicates in a way that is unlike any animal or plant known to science."

However, some people are concerned or even fearful of self-replicating biotechnology, as if AI suddenly became self-aware.

But the team notes that these millimeter-sized living robots are controlled under laboratory conditions and can be easily destroyed.

However, despite concerns and risks, we cannot completely ignore the important results of this research. It may be applied to regenerative medicine. The new living robot may become a new carrier for intelligent drug delivery or internal and external surgery, providing better solutions for the treatment of diseases such as trauma, congenital defects, cancer and aging, and may even help with the development of new coronavirus vaccines.

In addition, the study also broke people's inherent understanding of the reproduction of life, and people observed a new way of reproduction for the first time. As the researchers wrote in the paper:

“There are so many surprising behaviors of life hidden beneath the surface, waiting to be discovered.”

References:

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-11-xenobots-team-robots.html

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2112672118

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-01-team-robots.html

www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1910837117