This Is Your Robot Brain on Mushrooms

This Is Your Robot Brain on Mushrooms

By Saima S. Iqbal

The fungal network hidden under fleshy, white king oyster mushrooms doesn’t just sprout elegant appetizers. It can also serve as a keen robotic sensor, helping to pilot a wheeled bot and a squishy, star-shaped hopping one.

Oyster mushrooms’ rootlike mycelial threads generate voltage spikes when flashed with ultraviolet light. In an experiment for Science Robotics, researchers used this process to direct fungal tendrils, grown in a petri dish, to activate robots’ motors via attached electrodes.

These bots join a family of machines known as biohybrids. Successes so far range from a silicone-based jellyfish that uses cardiac cells to propel itself in water to a two-legged robot powered by laboratory-grown skeletal muscle. Most of these efforts use animal tissue in place of mechanical motors; the new study uses a radically different organism’s superpowers and thus expands engineers’ toolboxes, says Rashid Bashir, a biohybrid researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who was not involved with the new study.

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Fungi are inexpensive to maintain and excel at detecting subtle shifts—not only in light but also in nutrients and gases such as carbon dioxide and ammonia, says senior study author Robert F. Shepherd, an engineer at Cornell University. Shepherd dreams of agricultural uses for fungi-powered bots: machines that harvest ripe fruit, for instance, or add nitrogen to arid soil. His team began with light sensing for a simpler proof-of-concept experiment.

Translating a signal into motion for the rolling and starfish-shaped robots presented its own…