Mushroom learns to crawl after being given robot body

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. The biohybrid robot uses electrical signals from an edible type of mushroom called a king trumpet in order to move around and sense its environment. “Living systems respond to touch, they respond to light, they respond to heat, they respond to even some unknowns, like signals,” said Anand Mishra, a research associate in the Organic Robotics Lab at Cornell. We can leverage these living systems, and any unknown input comes in, the robot will respond to that.” Researchers from Cornell University in the US and the University of Florence in Italy placed a species of edible mushroom within a robot body Different inputs, such as ultraviolet light, resulted in different outcomes for the way the robot moved. “The potential for future robots could be to sense soil chemistry in row crops and decide when to add more fertiliser, for example, perhaps mitigating downstream effects of agriculture like harmful algal blooms.” Details of the biohybrid robot were published in the journal Science Robotics, in a study titled ‘Sensorimotor control of robots mediated by electro-physiological measurements of fungal mycelia’.