From bioinspired to biological robots, and back again.

Abstract

The histories of the Artificial Intelligence and robotics communities have been primarily those of bioinspiration: observing, distilling, and instantiating a wealth of biological structures and mechanisms into machines. However, this transferal from biology to technology has been uneven: the machine learning community has focused on non-physical mechanisms, like synaptic plasticity, while the robotics community has focused on physical structures, like the quadrupedal body plan. Organisms however offer a wealth of physical mechanisms, like bones that strengthen in response to load or tissues that regenerate in response to amputation, that have yet to be instantiated in machines. Biological robots—machines built entirely from biological tissue–exhibit many of these morphological mechanisms ‘for free’, suggesting that biobots could be designed in future to exaggerate these adaptive mechanisms, or provide hints for how they can be incorporated into morphologically self-editing robots.