Biobots Use Skeletal Muscle

It might be hard to imagine a personal robot to clean your house, but it’s not farfetched to suppose human-like robots could clean up the heavily damaged Fukushima Daichi nuclear reactor, or a toxic waste dump, or even remove old asbestos shingles from a house.  In designing such robots, engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have printed robot muscles from hydrogels containing collagen and matrix proteins and insulin-like growth factor.  An electrical pulse controls the speed of the muscular movement. MORE

Image Credit: Janet Sinn-Hanlon, Design Group@VetMed and GizMag.com