The benefits of mushrooms have long been documented, and we are now seeing a resurgence of people adding them to their diet, their pet’s diets, and even their beauty routine.
But now researchers at Cornell University have added them to something new: robots.
Why fungi?
Previous scientific studies have shown that fungi can sense their surroundings, learn from them, and even make decisions and adapt as they grow1. As the network of mycelium (the fungal threads that grow under the surface) grows, a stream of chemicals, nutrients, and electrical impulses keeps the entire network informed.
The lead researcher on the team believes that harnessing fungi can enhance a robot’s ability to sense the environment around it and respond quickly, thus allowing for greater autonomy than is currently possible.
Fungi are also experts at thriving in a wide variety of environments, which makes them the perfect candidate for robots that may need to work in unknown and unexpected environments.
Plus, fungi are all natural and biodegradable, therefore potentially reducing the environmental impact of robotics in the future.
How fungi help a robot move
So how does it all work?
Boiled down to the basics, the scientists are using the fungi’s natural light sensitivity. They created an interface to both house mycelial networks from a King Oyster Mushroom and measure their electrical activity. From there, the interface connects to a control module that tracks the rhythmic spikes from the mycelia.
Researchers actually made two separate robots: one soft and shaped like a starfish and another wheeled.
They were put through their paces across three experiments:
First, they simply moved in response to the natural, continuous spikes in the mycelium’s signals to get a baseline level of movement.
Next, the researchers exposed the robots to ultraviolet light and noted how they altered their movements, which showed that they were responding to the stimuli.
And in the final experiment, the researchers attempted, and successfully managed, to override the fungi’s signals entirely.
The reason for the research
The researchers hope that in the future, this will help contribute to biorobots. They could be used in things like farming, where the robots sense the chemistry of the soil to know precisely when to add fertilizer.
Fungi are already known to respond to touch, light, and heat; and more options for stimuli are being discovered by mycologists all the time.
Research and future directions
The lead author is Anand Mishra of Cornell University’s Organic Robotics Lab – a lab headed up by Rob Shepherd. Other members of the team included Jaeseok Kim of the University of Florence in Tuscany, as well as Cornell University academics Hannah Baghdadi, Bruce Johnson, and Kathie Hodge.
“This paper is the first of many that will use the fungal kingdom to provide environmental sensing and command signals to robots to improve their levels of autonomy,” Shepherd said. “By growing mycelium into the electronics of a robot, we were able to allow the biohybrid machine to sense and respond to the environment. In this case we used light as the input, but in the future it will be chemical. The potential for future robots could be to sense soil chemistry in row crops and decide when to add more fertilizer, for example, perhaps mitigating downstream effects of agriculture like harmful algal blooms.”
References
- Money, Nicholas P. “Hyphal and Mycelial Consciousness: The Concept of the Fungal Mind.” Fungal Biology, vol. 125, no. 4, Apr. 2021, pp. 257–259, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.funbio.2021.02.001. ↩︎
