In this video from the Stanford HPC Conference, Nicole Xu from Stanford University describes how she transformed a common jellyfish into a bionic creature that is part animal and part machine.
"Animal locomotion and bioinspiration have the potential to expand the performance capabilities of robots, but current implementations are limited. Mechanical soft robots leverage engineered materials and are highly controllable, but these biomimetic robots consume more power than corresponding animal counterparts. Biological soft robots from a bottom-up approach offer advantages such as speed and controllability but are limited to survival in cell media. Instead, biohybrid robots that comprise live animals and self- contained microelectronic systems leverage the animals’ own metabolism to reduce power constraints and body as an natural scaffold with damage tolerance. We demonstrate that by integrating onboard microelectronics into live jellyfish, we can enhance propulsion up to threefold, using only 10 mW of external power input to the microelectronics and at only a twofold increase in cost of transport to the animal. This robotic system uses 10 to 1000 times less external power per mass than existing swimming robots in literature and can be used in future applications for ocean monitoring to track environmental changes."
Learn more: sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/02/05/stanford-rese…
and
www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com/events/2020/stanford-wo…
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