The beginnings of Hybrid Robots

Scientists want to create robots capable of moving, growing and even regenerating

The border between the biological and the mechanical shows signs that one day it could really disappear, at least that is what scientists at Harvard Medical School say, who are carrying out one of the most audacious experiments in modern engineering, creating robots capable of moving, growing and even regenerating, not with motors, but with living muscle cells.

The study led by researcher Su Ryon Shin marks her decisive advance in the field of biohybrid robotics, an emerging area that seeks to unite biological tissues with synthetic structures. The ambition is clear, to replace circuits and gears with real muscles, allowing machines to act with the fluidity and sensitivity of a human body.

Physical union between the meat and the machine.

These robots are built from two types of muscles, the skeletal muscle, which contracts through electrical impulses, and the cardiac muscle, which beats rhythmically on its own, but keeping these cells alive outside the human body is a monumental challenge; they require oxygen, nutrients and a controlled environment, conditions that traditional engineering has never needed to maintain.

To overcome that obstacle, researchers turn to advanced technologies such as 3D bioprinting, electrofibrillation and microfluidics, capable of organizing and nourishing cells within microscopic scaffolds, with them, living tissues can align, contract and generate real movements, not a mechanical simulation, but genuine biological force, however, there are still limitations.

The first prototypes are fragile, they survive only in laboratories and do not withstand unpredictable environments, Harvard claims that it is working to change that and they are not alone in this race, researchers at MIT have already created artificial muscles that move like the human iris, while other universities are working on biological robots based on lung cells.

The sets of these initiatives build the first glimpse of a world where living machines leave fiction behind, and if this path continues, the future of robotics could sound strangely organic, blurring the border between flesh and machine.