Slime Mold Controls Hexapod
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 3 of September , 2009 at 3:44 am
Yesterday’s post about a slime mold robot (or apparently, more accurately called a “plasmodium”) got me curious as to whether or not all the stuff that the researchers were talking about is, realistically, at all possible. As it turns out, this bizarre non-animal non-plant goop is way, way smarter than it looks.
Back in 2006, researchers from the UK and Japan used a dollop of physarum polycephalum slime to directly control a hexapod. The slime likes dark, moist places, but it doesn’t just happen to grow there, it actually seeks out environments it likes by moving away from light sources. The slime was grown in a shape with six points on top of a circuit, and when light was shone on one of the points, the circuit sensed the slime trying to move away and activated that leg of the hexapod, causing the robot to move in the same direction, turning light-sensitive slime into a control system for a light-sensitive hexapod.
Slime molds have also been shown to be able to solve mazes; read more about that here.
[ PDF Paper ] VIA [ New Scientist ]
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Category: Biorobotics,Research
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