Mushrooms play an important role in our world, including breaking down dead organic matter and recycling nutrients back into the environment, being a nutritious food source for humans and animals, providing a host of health benefits in medicine, and certain species can help clean up environmental pollutants. The list goes on.
Now mushrooms are being taken a step further and into the world of robots with new research indicating that mushrooms could power a new generation of robots.
Alexis Gajewski, senior editor of Plant Services recently reported that researchers at Cornell have engineered a pair of robots that use the power of fungi, harnessing fungal mycelia's electrical signals to control the "biohybrid" robots. Mycelia, which is the underground vegetative part of mushrooms, can sense chemical and biological signals and respond to multiple inputs.
The scientists cultured king oyster mushrooms—one of the most commonly eaten mushrooms in the world—inside a 3D-printed scaffold. The scaffold had electrodes built into the bottom, and as the mycelia grew, they fused onto those electrodes. The scaffold was then hooked up to a five-legged, starfish-shaped robot that was built out of both rigid and soft materials. When the researchers hit the fungi with flashes of light, they would electrically stimulate the electrodes, controlling the robot's legs and making it stand up straight.
