New Biological Approach Helps Robots Sense Chemicals

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are one step closer to creating biological-mechanical hybrid machines as they work to develop soft robots that can sense and respond to chemical signals. "A lot of the inspiration actually comes from looking at different kinds of species around us that can interact and respond to their surrounding environment in exciting ways," said Kyle Justus, who graduated with a Ph.D. from Mechanical Engineering earlier this year. "The ones that always stuck out to me were the octopus and cuttlefish and how they can interact with their environment and camouflage themselves to hide from predators. The fact that these organisms have cells that can sense and respond to their surrounding environment and basically act as soft machines was really exciting to us." Inspired by the fascinating organisms in nature, Justus and his team collaborated across biology, mechanical engineering and robotics. Carmel Majidi , an associate professor of mechanical engineering, and Philip LeDuc , a professor of mechanical engineering, supervised the work. Cheemeng Tan, a former fellow of CMU's Lane Center for Computational Biology , and now an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of California, Davis, to combine synthetic biology and soft robotics.