Scientists at the University of the West of England are developing robots that are made out of mold. Rather than creating a traditional robot out of metal and wires, these scientists are building robots from a living organism. Physarum polycephalum is the type of mold that they are using.

Photo by Christian Fischer

The scientists are calling these biological robots “plasmabots”. These organic robots can be “programmed” to carry small objects from one location to another. The plasmabots can even determine the shortest paths to take on their own. According to Science Daily the researchers are looking into future applications of the plasmabots that would include delivering medicine to a particular point in the human body.

This is certainly a contrast in styles to the method being developed by the Israeli Institute of Technology which is developing very tiny metal robots that can swim through a person’s bloodstream to deliver medicine or perform other tasks. You can read what we wrote about this project here.

In the future it will certainly be interesting to see which method is the one that is adopted or if both are used depending on the medical task that needs to be accomplished.

I suppose it also depends on the patient – would they rather have a metal robot swimming in their bloodstream, or a biological one?