04 March 2017

Robots Made with Human Flesh

Two University of Oxford biomedical researchers are calling for robots to be built with real human tissue, and they say the technology is there if we only choose to develop it. Right now, tissue engineering relies on bioreactors to grow sheets of cells. These machines often look like large fish tanks, filled with a rich soup of nutrients and chemicals that cells need to grow on a specialized trellis. The problem, is that bioreactors currently fail to mimic the real mechanical environment for cells. In other words, human cells in muscles and tendons grow while being stretched and moved around on our skeletons. Without experiencing these natural stresses, the tissue grafts produced by researchers often have a broad range of structural problems and low cell counts. That's where robots come in. The researchers propose a humanoid-bioreactor system with structures, dimensions, and mechanics similar to those of the human body.


As the robot interacted with its environment, tissues growing on its body would receive the typical strains and twists that they would if they grew on an actual human. The result would be healthy tissue, grown for the exact area on the body it was destined to replace. Researchers note that this would be especially helpful for bone-tendon-muscle grafts, because failure during healing often occurs at the interface between tissues. What would this humanoid-bioreactor system look like? It could possibly be built on top of a humanoid robot with soft robotics muscles made from electroactive polymers, and the growing muscles could piggyback on those to get their exercise. It would also need to be covered in soft, stretchable sensors to monitor the health of the growing tissues. The result might look a bit like the University of Tokyo's Kenshiro robot, whose actuators make realistically human movements.

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