A group of experts from numerous colleges declared in 2020 that they had created the first “alive robots.” These “xenobots,” as their scientists call them, are made from stem cells extracted from the embryos of the frog Xenopus laevis. To allow these robots to fulfill a set of duties, an algorithm has been assigned to determine the most promising forms. Scientists can combine hundreds of cells into the desired shapes to produce the living xenobots, thanks to pulses from the heart cells. For example, during the trials, the scienctists that when they put them in a Petri dish with stem cells, the tiny robots collected them and clumped them together. This type of reproduction, known as “kinetic auto replication,” had never been seen in a live creature before. For those concerned about the idea of living robots that are programmable and capable of reproducing themselves, the researchers point out that the xenobots now only reside in a controlled laboratory setting and are easy to eliminate, dissolving after seven days.
