Xenobots: World’s First Living Robots

In a path-breaking research, scientists at the University of Vermont (UVM) and Tufts University have repurposed living cells scraped from frog embryos and assembled them to create world’s first living robots, called Xenobots. A Xenobot is neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal; rather it comes under a new class of living, programmable organisms.

The Methodology

• Xenobots were designed after months of processing on the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at the University of Vermont.
• An evolutionary algorithm was used to create thousands of candidate designs for the new life-forms. The more successful simulated organisms were ....