Humanoid musculoskeletal robots have been designed to replicate the human anatomy, and this structure could improve applicability of biologically engineered tissues. A humanoid robot called Eccerobot whose design mimics the anatomy of a human. (Photo via University of Oxford, Popular Science; Kevan-Flickr)
Humanoid robots are believed to have a wide range of future applications besides haunting people’s dreams with their transparent anatomy. All jokes aside, though, humanoid robot technology has potentially vast and varied applications in medicine, personal assistance, and space exploration, according to researchers from the University of Oxford. Recently there has been significant progress in the realms of medicine; specifically, that researchers have been able to manifest living bones, contracting muscles, and small-scale organs.
These advancements allow researchers to test the effects of certain drugs, study diseases and navigate around obstacles such as tissue rejection, as well as helping to guide an understanding of how these parts of the human anatomy function within the overall system. All of this accumulated information contributes to the wealth of knowledge that is presumably needed to one day grow and harvest organs in a lab to be used in human patients in order to improve, or even save their lives.
Currently, humanoid robots such as the Eccerobot and Kenshiro effectively mimic the musculoskeletal structure of human anatomy, and researchers from the University of Oxford believe these kinds of humanoid robots will be instrumental in the development of tissues that function appropriately in humans. According to Sarah Fecht of Popular Science, the humanoid robots would provide an imitative structure that would promote the growth of these tissues in a way that maintains a similar, “...multidirectional bending and stretching of the human body, which helps our muscles grow and get stronger.” Co-author of the research, and tissue engineer, Pierre Mouthuy, asserts that there is no better bioreactor than the the human body itself, and so the more similar the environment, the better the chance of producing functional bioengineered tissues.
Mouthuy and co-author, Andrew Carr, are currently toying with the idea of encasing engineered tissue in an artificial skin, or protective membrane that would simultaneously protect the metal parts and circuitry of the robot, as well as providing a safe environment for the developing tissue to receive all the nutrients and moisture it could possibly need. They seek to determine whether the humanoid bioreactor concept is even possible, and if so, they could possibly enable the potentiality of “biohybrid humanoids,” which would, in short, be robots whose movements are facilitated by cells instead of machinery.
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