A team from the University of Tokyo has just presented a notable technological advance in the field of bio-hybrid robots, which could have applications for transplants and cosmetic products.
The story is not a remix of Frankenstein but reality. A new generation of bio-hybrid robots – a mixture of artificial and living components – has just emerged in Japan, from the hands of researchers at the University of Tokyo, according to the journal Cell Reports Physical Sciences. Among these machines, there is especially this robot with a face wearing skin created from a culture of human tissue. The result is… monstrous.
To recreate a natural smile, Japanese scientists “gelatinized” human tissue, which they attached inside the robot’s holes. A method of bonding skin tissue to solid structures inspired by human ligaments. Result: the skin, two millimeters thick, has fewer layers than our real epidermis but it remains much more flexible than the usually synthetic layer of androids, reports France Info.
On the X account of the University of Tokyo, a video shows this robot covered with a pale pink and shiny epidermis. In the middle, two clear, bulging eyes, motionless. As the robot imitates a smile, the skin moves, folds at the cheekbones and snaps back into place.
Above all, this robot remains a scientific object of research and demonstrates progress in research. Specialists hope “that this technology will make it possible to better understand training des rides and the physiology of facial expressions, and that it will contribute to the development of transplantation materials and cosmetic products», said the team led by computer mechanics professor Shoji Takeuchi. Ultimately, their objective will be to provide these products with “inherent self-healing abilities” to human skin.
In previous studies, they had also grafted collagen onto laboratory-grown skin with a cut, affixed to a robotic finger. The goal was to demonstrate how it could heal itself.
This team of Tokyo researchers has also developed a walking bio-robot. Five centimetres high, it was fashioned from rat muscle tissue. They have developed a skeleton “with sort of plastic hips and feet connected by organic muscles. And, to make this mini-robot walk, they send electrical impulses alternately in each leg. reports France Info.
Yes, yes “small biped” walk of “natural way”according to its creators, it is still far from equaling the human being: it takes two minutes to cover a centimeter, and it only works in water, its muscles drying out too quickly in the open air.
