A xenobot is a robot made up of skin cells of frog eggs instead of metals or plastics. The xenobot, which is on millimeter wide, is described as a “reconfigurable organism,” according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“At the moment they don’t do much,” Kriegman said. “We can get them to walk across the petri dish very, very slowly or swim through watery fluid very, very slowly.”
Xenobots, also known as the world’s first living robots, have the capability to reproduce, according to a recent study from the University of Vermont, Tufts University and Harvard University.
Researchers published their study earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Xenobots are made up of a collection of frog egg cells that can function as one tiny unit. They are engineered inside of a petri dish and can be programmed to move.
Researchers recently found out that when they sprinkled more cells inside a petri dish, the existing xenobots, acting as bulldozers, push the cells together to create a separate xenobot.
Although the tiny organisms can’t feed themselves or respond to stimuli, scientists describe them as “lifeforms” or “living machines” due to the fact that they can feed off of energy supplied by their cells, move with intent and repair their injuries.
The xenobots were first designed in 2020 on a supercomputer at the University of Vermont and then assembled and tested by biologists at Tufts University in Massachusetts.