Scientists gave a mushroom a robot body and it's already learned to

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If you paid any attention to action movies from the ’80s and ’90s, you’ll know that one day, robots are going to kill us all. And if you paid any attention to the video games or its HBO adaptation, Last of Us, you’ll know that, one day, mushrooms are going to kill us all.

Well, a bunch of engineers got together and thought: How can we speed this up?

Scientists from Cornell University and Italy’s Florence University have teamed up to bring mushrooms and robots together. And not just any mushroom — it’s the king trumpet mushroom.

These biohybrid robots move around and sense their environment by using electrical signals from the fungi. They’ve got this mushroom-powered robot doing the slow shuffle across a surface, pumping its little legs, and reacting to things like UV light. Documentation got a bit fuzzy when the mushroom jumped on someone’s face Alien-style.

One of the researchers, Anand Mishra, from the Organic Robotics Lab says, “Living systems respond to touch, they respond to light, they respond to heat, they respond to even some unknowns, like signals.”

My only question is if they “respond” to flamethrowers.

‘That’s why we think, OK, if you wanted to build future robots, how can they work in an unexpected environment? We can leverage these living systems, and any unknown input comes in, the robot will respond to that.

‘By growing mycelium into the electronics of a robot, we were able to allow the biohybrid machine to sense and respond to the environment,’ said Rob Shepherd, a Cornell professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

‘The potential for future robots could be to sense soil chemistry in row crops and decide when to add more fertiliser, for example, perhaps mitigating downstream effects of agriculture like harmful algal blooms.’

More details can be found in a study published in Science Robotics, titled “Sensorimotor control of robots mediated by electrophysiological measurements of fungal mycelia.”