Using Plant Cells for Robot Control

Posted 10 Feb 2006 at 20:05 UTC by steve

Roland Piquepaille writes, "Controlling robots in complex environments is not an easy task, but it would greatly increase their usages. Yet living organisms are facing complexity and successfully dealing with it. So why not apply lessons from nature to robotics? Researchers from Japan and U.K. built an interface between a plant and an omnidirectional hexapod robot." The researchers integrated amoeboid plasmodium cells into the robot's controller by projecting sensor data onto them as light patterns and reading the output with a CCD camera. Read more about this in Roland's blog or in the paper published by one of the researchers, Robot Control: From Silicon Circuitry to Cells (PFD format).