Honestly, can you believe that we can use the moulds to build a robot? Well, as others did, it sounds like “Mission Impossible”…

However, a research team from University of the West of England had proven that everything is possible, included built the world’s first ever biological robot using mould!

Alright, some of you might be disgusted, as moulds are being categorized as the microscopic fungi that grow in the form of multicellular filaments. In general, microscopic fungi in a single cell are called yeasts.

Well, some of the molds will cause diseases or food spoilage, but most of them are playing important role in biodegradation, such as the fermentation, food production, beverages, antibiotics and enzymes!

The researchers have received a Leverhulme Trust grant, which is worth £228,000 to develop the amorphous non-silicon biological robot, “Plasmobot”, using plasmodium.

For your information, plasmodium is one of the vegetative stages of the slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, commonly occurring mould which lives in forests, gardens and most damp places in the United Kingdom!

Professor Andy Admatzky, who is also the leader of the research team, says the plasmabot is capable to sense objects and transport tiny objects along pre-programmed directions. He described that the robots are equipped with parallel inputs and outputs, and fully-controlled by spatial gradients of light!

He is very confident that once the plasmabot have been launched into the market, they can be a very good assistant/helper in the military, factory or outer space! [physorg]

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 8:49 am and is filed under Robotics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.