Mold sure is interesting. In the past, I’ve discussed mutant mold from outer space seeking to invade Earth, a fungus as the largest organism on the planet, and cursed mold rising from a mummy’s tomb – go ahead and check our blog archives for these stories. So what news could I share to possibly rival these incredible topics? Two words: mold robots!
Leave it to the folks at a London university to create “Plasmobots” – complete robots made out of plasmodium slime mold.
“Why?” you ask? Well mold is actually pretty intelligent for a single-celled organism. Plasmodium slime mold, physarum polycephalum, a common mold found living in forests, gardens, and damp places in the UK, actually knows how to seek out and consume food, and it knows to shy away from light. Plasmodium is capable of solving complex tasks, like the shortest path between points and other logical calculations.
So the concept is to “program” a Plasmobot by using light and electromagnetic stimuli to trigger chemical reactions in its behavior. By manipulating these reactions we could program the mold robot to move, pick up objects, and even assemble them.
The project lead, Professor Andy Adamatzky, previously used these Belousov-Zhbotinsky reactions to build liquid logic gates for a synthetic brain. Adamatzky has received 228,000 pounds in funding for the project to engineer these mold robots.
“It will be a fully controllable and programmable amorphous intelligent robot with an embedded massively parallel computer,” says Adamatzky. It should also be noted that the project would be the first organic computer and creates the potential for amorphous computing.
If successful, the Plasmobot will be able to sense objects, span them in the shortest and best way possible, and transport tiny objects along preprogrammed directions. They will have parallel inputs and outputs, a network of sensors, and the number crunching power of super computers.
Although theoretical, Plasmobots could one day be used to assemble micromachines. Adamatzky also believes it is possible in the very distant future for mold robots to live in our skin and carry out routine tasks, thus freeing up our brains for other things.
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