ETH Zurich builds muscle bioactuators that jump, swim, walk and grasp: range of motion up to 11 times greater than earlier systems
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
Designing muscle and scaffold together on a computer made tiny robots move noticeably more strongly; use outside the lab is still a long way off.
Researchers at ETH Zurich (Robert Katzschmann's Soft Robotics Lab; the work is in Nature Communications) designed centimetre-scale living muscle tissue and a soft hydrogel scaffold together on a computer for the first time. An algorithm searched for configurations in which muscle contraction produces the largest displacement of the whole part; the scaffolds were 3D-printed with light using a technique called xolography, taking about a minute each. The result is bioactuators about 1.5 cm long made of muscle grown from mouse cells: according to the authors, their range of motion is up to 11 times greater than that of earlier systems with the same amount of tissue. One actuator lifts itself about 5 mm (a third of its body length), and a walking version moves at 6.2 mm/s — faster relative to body size than any walking biohybrid robot reported so far. Limitations: the robots survive only in a nutrient solution, larger systems would need an artificial blood supply, and living tissues do not all behave the same way.
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