Robots could use live invertebrates as grippers to help them pick up tricky objects or grab things underwater.
“We don’t mean it as a replacement for robotics, but as a kind of new direction or new way of doing both biology and robotics,” says Josephine Galipon at Tohoku University in Japan.
But others have questioned how useful or ethical this approach is.
Researchers have previously experimented with using live insects to control entire robots or even using entire dead spiders as robot grippers.
Galipon and her colleagues have now made grabs from pill bugs – a type of woodlouse – and chitons – marine molluscs that can cling tightly to rocks like a sea snail.
The team made custom 3D-printed enclosures for both organisms and attached them to a robotic arm. The pill bugs picked up a piece of cotton wool for about 2 minutes and spun it before releasing it. The chitons picked up cork, wood and plastic cylinders underwater, but did not easily release the objects.
While the release mechanisms need further development, the chiton’s ability to pick up cork and wood is promising, as it’s a difficult task for the suction cups conventionally used in underwater robot grabs, Galipon says.
It’s a new approach, he says Steve Davis at the University of Birmingham, UK, but it’s unclear what tasks the insects could perform that current robot grippers can’t. “It’s different, but what is it trying to address?” he says.
Galipon does not specify what tasks the grippers would be useful for and say, “To move to the next stage in robotics, maybe we should stop putting labels on things.”
There are also “all sorts of ethical questions surrounding this work,” Davis says, especially if researchers were to try and control when the animals grab and release objects.
Galipon says the animals have done no harm; after the experiment, the pillbugs were released back into the wild and the chitons continued to live in a water tank. “Especially for sentient animals, we want to establish a kind of two-way interaction with a collaborative relationship,” says Galipon. “It’s a bit different from domestication, but just a collaboration, where the animal can then do its thing.”
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