A swimming robot actuated by cultured skeletal muscle tissue

Abstract

Biohybrid robots composed of synthetic skeletons and living components have recently gained interests as a solution to engineering biological dynamic systems. Among the living components, muscle tissues are used as actuators for biohybrid robots, resulting in vitro reproduction of various movements. Especially, swimming robots containing living muscle tissues or cardiomyocytes have been proposed as representative examples of biohybrid robots. However, these robots have limitations on reproducibility and controllability due to individual differences between each explanted living muscle tissues and the self-contraction of cardiomyocytes, respectively. To solve the issue, a swimming robot with cultured skeletal muscle tissue is required since it allows to control the shape and contraction of the cultured tissue. In this paper, we propose the construction method of a swimming robot with cultured skeletal muscle tissue. Our method can prevent spontaneous shrinkage before transferring the tissue from an appropriate culture substrate for tissue formation to the swimming robot. Using the method, we succeeded in the preparation of a swimming robot with three different robot skeleton and skeletal muscle tissues cultured under the same condition, regardless of the spontaneous shrinkage during culture. As a result, we obtained the relationship between shapes of robot skeletons and propulsion of the robot and confirmed that the robot can move forward by shaking a tail fin. We believe that the method for integrating skeletal muscle tissues with the synthetic skeleton will be useful for the easy preparation of biohybrid robots and devices.