Robots created with 3D printed muscle tissue

A re­search group from the In­sti­tute for Bio­engi­neer­ing of Cat­alo­nia (IBEC) work­ing on smart nanobiode­vices has cre­ated hy­brid ro­bots that com­bine syn­thetic ma­te­r­ial with mus­cle tis­sue cre­ated by 3D bio­print­ing. Due to their par­tially bi­o­logic na­ture, the tiny ro­botic de­vices offer more ad­van­tages in terms of per­for­mance and move­ment than cur­rent purely ar­ti­fi­cial de­vices.

IBEC is a lead­ing cen­tre in the re­search and de­sign of nanobiode­vices aimed at, for ex­am­ple, de­liv­er­ing med­ical com­pounds to cer­tain parts of the body in a more pre­cise man­ner.

“Bi­o­log­i­cally in­spired soft ro­botic de­vices be­long to a new dis­ci­pline that can help us over­come the lim­i­ta­tions of con­ven­tional ro­botic sys­tems, in areas like flex­i­bil­ity, ca­pac­ity of re­ac­tion and adapt­abil­ity,” says Samuel Sánchez, Icrea re­search pro­fes­sor and chief re­searcher at IBEC.

The re­searchers used 3D bio­print­ing to cre­ate the mus­cle tis­sue, which was then ap­plied to the robot’s bioac­tu­a­tors be­fore cal­i­brat­ing the force and study­ing ge­netic ex­pres­sion to eval­u­ate the adapt­abil­ity to train­ing ex­er­cises.

“We saw that they are func­tional and sen­si­tive and the forces they gen­er­ate can be mod­u­lated in re­gards to the dif­fer­ent needs,” says Tania Patiño, post­doc­toral re­searcher and the au­thor of the ar­ti­cle that de­scribes the re­search in the mag­a­zine Ad­vanced Ma­te­ri­als Tech­nolo­gies.