The Army Wants to Give Its Robots Living Muscle Tissue
The Army Research Lab is exploring equipping its future army robots with organic muscle tissue.
Organic muscle tissue is inherently superior to mechanical locomotion systems.
Robots of the future could use lab-grown muscle tissue instead of wheels, mechanical arms, and other mechanisms.
The U.S. Army is looking into using animal muscle tissue as a means to move robots.
The Army Research Laboratory believes its bots could use real muscle, which allows most living things to move and manipulate their environments, instead of mechanical arms, wheels, tracks, and other systems to travel across the battlefield. The concept, which some might find disturbing, is an example of the new field of “biohybrids.”
Today’s military robots, particularly ground-based robots, navigate the battlefield on wheels and tracks, methods of locomotion copied over from human-occupied vehicles. But researchers “are reaching a point where they’re experiencing diminishing returns in the design of these robots with wheels as their primary locomotor, and batteries as their centralized power system,” NextGov reports.
Modern army robots use batteries that power motors, which then drive axles and turn wheels. A biohybrid-powered robot would replace this entire system with lab-grown organic muscle tissue that might power artificial legs or other limbs. Electrical impulses or chemical actuation would control the muscles.
One of the major advantages of using organic muscle tissue is its inherent flexibility. Muscles and tendons can flex, pull, and give as an animal moves over mixed terrain, and especially as it encounters unexpected problems.
Dr. Dean Culver, a research scientist at the Army Research Lab, explains it like this, via NextGov:
“If you run through a field, and your foot steps into a rabbit hole, even before the signal from your foot has reached your brain to say, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m in a rabbit hole,’ your body is already moving to accommodate that sudden change. Part of that is the way that control systems are designed in organisms—that’s obviously really amazing—but another part of that is the ability of muscles and tendons to bend and flex a little bit, and offer those control systems an opportunity to adapt. So that is a huge capability that we could offer.”
A wheel-bound robot can’t do that, instead relying on shock absorbers to make up for the sudden shift.
“Robots who are, obviously, in Army applications going to go into unknown and unpredictable environments—they need to be able to adapt to things that they weren’t planning for,” Culver said. “So, that’s a big part of this effort as well.”
Biohybrid robots could show great promise, but there’s a lot to think about. Are humans ready for robots with legs and actual organic muscle moving across the battlefield? Machines work for living things, and it’s a bit unsettling to think of living tissue as an inseparable part of a machine—especially as a weapon of war.
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