Article · AI translation
IT Home reported on October 28 that ETH Zurich published a blog post on October 22 showcasing a biohybrid miniature robot made from mouse skeletal muscle cells and a hydrogel scaffold that can jump, run, swim and grasp.
IT Home has included the related demonstration video below:
The work integrates living skeletal muscle tissue with a flexible hydrogel scaffold for the first time. Designed together in a computer, they form a “bioactuator” about 1.5 centimeters long. When stimulated by electrical pulses, it produces bending movements visible to the naked eye and drives miniature robots to jump, swim, crawl and grasp.
The ETH Zurich team noted that although lab-grown muscles could contract in the past, the movements were often so small that they required a microscope to observe and could not effectively drive robots. The breakthrough in the new study lies in redesigning how the muscle and scaffold interact: an algorithm simultaneously optimizes the distribution and volume of muscle tissue and the shape and mechanical properties of the hydrogel scaffold, so that muscle contractions translate as efficiently as possible into deformation of the whole structure.
For fabrication, the team used a light-curing 3D printing technique called Xolography, which uses light to solidify hydrogel. Printing a single scaffold takes about one minute.
The results show that, with similar amounts of muscle, the new actuator achieves a range of motion up to 11 times that of previous systems. A single contraction can lift the device about 5 millimeters off the bottom of a culture dish, equivalent to one-third of its body length; the walking version reached a speed of 6.2 millimeters per second, or about 0.4 body lengths per second, which the study says is the highest speed reported to date for a walking biohybrid robot.
However, such robots remain far from practical use. Their muscle tissue must be immersed in nutrient solution to survive, and they cannot operate outside a laboratory environment. Scaling them up might also require a system resembling “artificial blood circulation” to continuously deliver oxygen and nutrients and remove metabolic waste.