The March of the Mushroom Robots

Recently, a team of scientists cobbled together two such hybrids: Powered by the fungi’s bioelectrical signaling, one walked and the other rode on wheels. Their findings were published in Science Robotics.

The work is part of a growing field called biohybrid robotics, which aims to make robots more lifelike by fusing them with living tissue. “Mammalian tissue is hard to work with, but mushrooms are easy,” says Robert Shepherd, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at Cornell University and one of the authors of the paper.  

Shepherd and his team experimented with king oyster mushrooms, which they cultivated themselves. The group started with the fruiting bodies—the mushroom caps we see above the soil—as the living material, but they soon learned that these caps decompose too quickly. So they turned to mycelia, the root-like structure of a fungus consisting of a mass of branching filaments.

Mycelia have evolved to sense their environment, communicate over large distances, and transport nutrients. They are also naturally sensitive to light. It turns out this sensitivity can be used to power movement. The team created an electrical interface that interpreted the mycelia’s activity and translated it into information to move the robot parts. When stimulated by ultraviolet light, the robot fungi fled from the light.

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