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A combined team of bio researchers and roboticists from Brigham and Women's Hospital, in the U.S., and the iPrint Institute, in Switzerland, has developed a tiny swimming robot using human motor neurons and cardiomyocytes grown to emulate muscle tissue.

Their paper is published in the journal Science Robotics. Nicole Xu, a mechanical engineer at the University of Colorado Boulder, has published a Focus piece in the same journal issue outlining ongoing work to create bioinspired robots using animal tissue.

For many years, science fiction writers and movie makers have used the idea of combining electronics, computers and animal tissue to create robots with unique and sometimes terrifying attributes. In the real world, Xu describes such work as ongoing.

Animals, including humans, have abilities that far surpass anything robots can do. Doing laundry, for example, requires a myriad of skills, including sorting dirty clothes, choosing washer and dryer settings, and folding or hanging clothes.

Such activities require both dexterity and mental processing. Because of that, roboticists are exploring the development of biohybrid robots. The research team created a ray-like swimming robot with a computer brain that controls human muscle cells activated by human motor neurons.

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