Researchers create a mushroom-brained, robot-bodied cyborg!

Some think its scary, other say he’s just a fun-gi 😀

The article from Cornell University is a super interesting read – in essence they have interfaced fungal mycelia (basically mushrooms) with electronics to both send signals to the fungus and received signals from the fungus, with some of the signals controlling a robot body that the fungus can move.

And yeah, my title is total clickbait – the fungus is nowhere near as complex as a brain and is consuming and producing very simple signals, so humanity is safe from our mushroom overlords … for now!

But why would anyone want to do this, we all ask? To quote the article: “This paper is the first of many that will use the fungal kingdom to provide environmental sensing and command signals to robots to improve their levels of autonomy,” … “By growing mycelium into the electronics of a robot, we were able to allow the biohybrid machine to sense and respond to the environment. In this case we used light as the input, but in the future it will be chemical. The potential for future robots could be to sense soil chemistry in row crops and decide when to add more fertilizer, for example, perhaps mitigating downstream effects of agriculture like harmful algal blooms.”

The other quote from the article that I like which demonstrates the fusion of biology and technology that characterizes so much of the 4IR : “You have to have a background in mechanical engineering, electronics, some mycology, some neurobiology, some kind of signal processing,” Mishra said. “All these fields come together to build this kind of system.”