What would happen if you took a mushroom and gave it a robot body? That must have been one of the questions scientists at Cornell University woke up hoping to answer this past year when they decided to throw a culture of edible king oyster mushrooms into a pair of robots. The resulting mushroom robots were surprisingly active.
Using a series of experiments, the researchers determined that the robots could actually translate the electrophysiological activity of the mushrooms to different environmental cues, allowing for them to drive the device’s movements forward.
Melding living things with machines isn’t exactly a new idea, and some folks like Elon Musk even hope to one day fuse man and machine together. With this experiment, though, the researchers were able to prove that mushroom robots can not only work but can also evolve and improve. In fact, when the group grew the mycelium into the electronics of the robots, they were able to sense and respond to the environment, not just drive the devices themselves.
The researchers say it isn’t much of a surprise that fungi are an untapped network of cybernetic tech, especially since they share neural networks very similar to those that computers and robotics run off of. Those networks are usually hidden from view, though, making it easy to forget that living things work similarly to electronics in how they pass messages along to the various parts of their bodies.
But by applying different algorithms to the machines and then feeding that output to microcontroller units, the researchers were able to prove that mushroom robots can actually work and that the mushrooms are more than capable of running themselves around and going wild. They also tested to see if the mushrooms could toggle different mechanical responses and found that, indeed, they could.
The researchers shared their findings in more detail in a paper published in Science Robotics.
