A caterpillar-like robot powered by cardiac cell contractions.Elise A. Corbin.
Device: Researchers used 3D printing technology to create centimeter-long robots, powered by contracting rat cardiac cells, which move by inching along a surface. Published last week (November 15) in Scientific Reports, the study clarifies some principles of biobot design, while demonstrating how 3D printing facilitates the process of robot construction.
“The merger of tissue engineering and 3D printing is very exciting,” said Henry Hess, a biomedical engineer at Columbia University who was not involved with the project. 3D printing technology makes fabrication of biobots easy, precise, and reproducible, allowing researchers to concentrate on refining the engineering principles underlying successful biobot design.
In order to make their caterpillar-like biological machine, Rashid Bashir and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign used a 3D printer ...
