Lifeboat Foundation

Building a robot takes time, technical skill, the right materials – and sometimes, a little fungus.

In creating a pair of new robots, Cornell researchers cultivated an unlikely component, one found not in the lab but on the forest floor: fungal mycelia. By harnessing mycelia’s innate electrical signals, the researchers discovered a new way of controlling “biohybrid” robots that can potentially react to their environment better than their purely synthetic counterparts.

The team’s paper, “Sensorimotor Control of Robots Mediated by Electrophysiological Measurements of Fungal Mycelia,” published Aug. 28 in Science Robotics. The lead author is Anand Mishra, a research associate in the Organic Robotics Lab led by Rob Shepherd, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in Cornell Engineering, and the paper’s senior author.