Virginia Tech scientist develops model for robots with bacterial brains.

Forget the Vulcan mind-meld of the Star Trek generation — as far as mind control techniques go, bacteria is the next frontier.

In a paper published today in Scientific Reports, which is part of the Nature Publishing Group, a Virginia Tech scientist used a mathematical model to demonstrate that bacteria can control the behavior of an inanimate device like a robot.

“Basically we were trying to find out from the mathematical model if we could build a living microbiome on a nonliving host and control the host through the microbiome,” said Warren Ruder, an assistant professor of biological systems engineering in both the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Engineering.

"We found that robots may indeed be able to function with a bacterial brain,” he said.

For future experiments, Ruder is building real-world robots that will have the ability to read bacterial gene expression levels in E. coli using miniature fluorescent microscopes. The robots will respond to bacteria he will engineer in his lab.

Link
lol first "Robot awareness " now we have a future of bacteria controlling robots !


Not sure how i feel about this one It kind of reminds me of a video i saw not to long ago where scientist were trying to integrate brain cells from rats onto micro chips , It appeared that they were successful.

Is this a step towards Bio-mecca integration ?

Thoughts ?

♠Kap♠

Wow this is getting scarier than I thought. We've come a long way from the first computer to this in a matter of years...

So basically (if i understand this correctly), the bacteria will control the robot and tell it what to do?

I want it to be mass produced around the world, nanosized so I cant see it, make swarms of them so they can work to accomplish a goal together, and make them as smart as me or smarter, only then will it be of any use to me.

Very cool, I'm picturing robots that function by utilizing bacterial mats or "brains"
Perhaps different bacteria would be used for different functions.

Or even a robot that uses a designed microbe to think, while the same bacteria produces fuel, as long as the bacteria lives, the robot never needs another source of power.

It'd be bringing the human form to a microscopic creature that kills animals via infection in the artistic engineering expression of a humanoid robot.

If it were humanoid looking, at least.

Now that'd be creepy, and it would bring a whole new meaning to the term 'bugs'.

a reply to: Kapusta

hold on. did he say they added a component that allowed the robot to communicate back to the bacteria? and once it did, the bacteria began using predatory stalking behaviors when choosing fuel sources?

originally posted by: FlySolo
a reply to: Kapusta

hold on. did he say they added a component that allowed the robot to communicate back to the bacteria? and once it did, the bacteria began using predatory stalking behaviors when choosing fuel sources?

Scary stuff right !

a reply to: Kapusta

yeah its wild but I don't think I'm grasping this. So what dictates the robot's movements and what kind of movements? What's the implication?

originally posted by: FlySolo
a reply to: Kapusta

yeah its wild but I don't think I'm grasping this. So what dictates the robot's movements and what kind of movements? What's the implication?

Guessing the robots are programmed to recognize certain key behaviors in bacteria thus executing a command ?

more info here link

I imagine what is happening is that the computer is able to "read" gene expressions that are triggered by needs of the bacteria or changes in their environment. An example is if they get hot if they have a gene expression to cool off it could trigger the robot to move until it finds a cooler location, and then the gene expression would stop and the robot would stop.