The robots are the brainchild of a collaborative team at the University of Vermont, Tufts University and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, the same team that built the first living robots: 'Xenobots' - assembled from frog cells – reported in 2020.
According to the researchers, these computer-designed and hand-assembled organisms can swim out into their tiny dish, find single cells, gather hundreds of them together, and assemble 'baby' Xenobots inside their Pac-Man-shaped “mouth”.
A few days later, these babies become new Xenobots that look and move just like themselves. And then these new Xenobots can go out, find cells, and build copies of themselves, and this process repeats.
“With the right design – they will spontaneously self-replicate,” said Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research.
In a Xenopus laevis frog, these...