Xenobot

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Xenobot on Wikipedia

Michael Levine

 

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Article "Meet Xenobot, an Eerie New Kind of Programmable Organism"
Researchers hope the living robots, made up of masses of cells working in coordination, can help unlock the mysteries of cellular communication.

by Matt Simon
January 13, 2020

Xenobots - the first “living robots”

Jan 14, 2020

Researchers used the Deep Green supercomputer cluster and an evolutionary algorithm to design new life-forms that could achieve an assigned task. Then they built them by combining together different biological tissues from Xenopus laevis embryos, hence the name Xenobots.
Credit:
A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms
Sam Kriegman, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin, and Josh Bongard
PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1910837117

"Team builds the first living robots"

January 13, 2020

 

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Article "Not bot, not beast: scientists create first ever living, programmable organism"
The groundbreaking Xenobots were created by a team from Tufts University and the University of Vermont.

by Simon Coghlan, Kobi Leins
January 19, 2020

 

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Meet the Xenobot, the world’s first-ever "living" robot

Feb 3, 2020

Measuring less than a millimeter wide, these micro-machines are programmable lifeforms that researchers from the University of Vermont and Tufts University believe could one day help clean microplastics from our oceans or even repair organs inside our bodies.

But what exactly is a “living” robot?! And should we expect to see them whizzing through our bloodstreams any time soon?

By pairing stem cells harvested from the embryos of the African Clawed frog with a sophisticated computer algorithm, researchers generated a blueprint design that allowed the team to build the brand new form of life known as xenobots.

If scaled up, xenobots could be used for regenerative medicine like repairing organs or growing body parts for transplant from the ground up. They could be created using a patient’s own cells, then inserted into their bloodstream and programmed to clear the plaque from clogged arteries or to detect cancer.

And the xenobot’s applications aren’t just limited to the medical field. The team also envisions assigning individual tasks to a swarm of xenobots so they can collect microplastics from the ocean or search for and collect radioactive contaminants.

But what are the ethical implications of creating a totally new form of life?

Find out more about how these “living” xenobots came to be and what their existence could mean for the future of humanity in this Elements.

 

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Article "Meet the Xenobots, Virtual Creatures Brought to Life"
Computer scientists and biologists have teamed up to make a new class of living robotics that challenge the boundary between digital and biological.

by Joshua Sokol
April 3, 2020

 

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Article "‘Is it a robot, is it a machine, is it an animal?’: The programable organisms coming to life"
There’s a bit of Frankenstein about xenobots, organisms created and programmed by roboticists from the cells of a frog, writes Joshua Sokol. But the uses may change the world we live in; from cleaning up plastics in the sea to targeting cancerous tumours

by Joshua Sokol
May 27, 2020

 

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Article "The Xenobot Future Is Coming—Start Planning Now"
We're on the cusp of being able to program biological systems like we program computers. That raises some thorny questions.

by Amy Webb
November 4, 2020

 

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Article "Neurobots: Tiny living robots now use neurons to guide movement and behavior"
Living robots called neurobots integrate neurons that reshape form and drive complex movement beyond cilia‑based motion.

by Neetika Walter
April 6, 2026