Mushrooms are truly amazing. They are a delicious addition to any dish, they have seemingly miraculous health benefits, and they can be used in the creation of various materials, including leather, paper, packaging, and more. This astonishing fungus is now poised to disrupt the robotics industry. New research indicates that mushrooms could power a new generation of robots. 

Researchers at Cornell have engineered a pair of robots that utilize the power of fungi. According to David Nutt for the Cornell Chronicle, the researchers were able to harness fungal mycelia’s innate electrical signals to control the “biohybrid” robots. While there have been attempts in the past to incorporate living materials into robots, the reality is that keeping these biological systems healthy and functional is more difficult than you might think. Mycelia, however, may solve these problems. Mycelia, which is the underground vegetative part of mushrooms, can sense chemical and biological signals and respond to multiple inputs.

Adam Kovac for Gizmodo explored how the researchers utilized mushrooms for their robots in a recent article. “To see if these benefits could be put to use in a biohybrid setting, the scientists cultured root-like mycelia structures of king oyster mushrooms—one of the most commonly eaten mushrooms in the world—inside a 3D-printed scaffold. The scaffold had electrodes built into the bottom, and as the mycelia grew, they fused onto those electrodes. The scaffold was then hooked up to a five-legged, starfish-shaped robot that was built out of both rigid and soft materials.”

Kovac adds, “The mycelia generated electrical signals when they were exposed to ultraviolet light. When the researchers hit the fungi with flashes of the light, they would electrically stimulate the electrodes. Those, in turn, were used to successfully control the robot’s legs, making it stand up straight.”

The team published their findings in a recent paper, “Sensorimotor control of robots mediated by electrophysiological measurements of fungal mycelia,” that appeared in Science Robotics. In an excerpt from the paper’s abstract, the researchers write, “We constructed two biohybrid robots that use the electrophysiological activity of living mycelia to control their artificial actuators. The mycelia sense their environment and issue action potential–like spiking voltages as control signals to the motors and valves of the robots that we designed and built. The paper highlights two key innovations: first, a vibration- and electromagnetic interference–shielded mycelium electrical interface that allows for stable, long-term electrophysiological bioelectric recordings during untethered, mobile operation; second, a control architecture for robots inspired by neural central pattern generators, incorporating rhythmic patterns of positive and negative spikes from the living mycelia. We used these signals to control a walking soft robot as well as a wheeled hard one. We also demonstrated the use of mycelia to respond to environmental cues by using ultraviolet light stimulation to augment the robots’ gaits.”

In a recent quote, Anand Mishra, a research associate in the Organic Robotics Lab and lead author of the paper, said, “If you think about a synthetic system – let’s say, any passive sensor – we just use it for one purpose. But living systems respond to touch, they respond to light, they respond to heat, they respond to even some unknowns, like signals,” Mishra said. “That’s why we think, OK, if you wanted to build future robots, how can they work in an unexpected environment? We can leverage these living systems, and any unknown input comes in, the robot will respond to that.”

Olivia Ferrari for National Geographic details the uses for biohybrid robots in a newly published article. “The new technology could be used in agriculture: fungi are extremely sensitive to their environment, and robots like these could detect chemical contaminants, poisons, or pathogens in crop fields better than synthetic robots. “

Ferrari continues, “Fungal cells can survive in very salty water or severe cold, which might make fungi biohybrid robots better than animal or plant biohybrid robots in extreme environments. Mushrooms can also survive radiation better than many other organisms, so they could help detect radiation at hazardous sites.“