Bio-hybrid robots flip meals waste into purposeful machines

Demonstration of the robotic gripper constituted of langoustine tails. 2025 CREATE Lab EPFL CC BY SA.

By Celia Luterbacher

Though many roboticists immediately flip to nature to encourage their designs, even bioinspired robots are often fabricated from non-biological supplies like steel, plastic and composites. However a brand new experimental robotic manipulator from the Computational Robotic Design and Fabrication Lab (CREATE Lab) in EPFL’s College of Engineering turns this development on its head: its foremost function is a pair of langoustine stomach exoskeletons.

Though it might look uncommon, CREATE Lab head Josie Hughes explains that combining organic parts with artificial elements holds important potential not solely to reinforce robotics, but in addition to help sustainable expertise techniques.

“Exoskeletons mix mineralized shells with joint membranes, offering a steadiness of rigidity and suppleness that enables their segments to maneuver independently. These options allow crustaceans’ fast, high-torque actions in water, however they can be very helpful for robotics. And by repurposing meals waste, we suggest a sustainable cyclic design course of wherein supplies could be recycled and tailored for brand spanking new duties.”

In a paper revealed in Superior Science, Hughes and her workforce exhibit three robotic purposes by augmenting the exoskeletons of langoustines, which had beforehand been harvested and processed for the meals trade, with the exact management and longevity of artificial elements: a manipulator that may deal with objects weighing as much as 500g, grippers that may bend and grasp varied objects, and a swimming robotic.

Design, function, recycle, repeat

For his or her examine, the CREATE Lab determined to convey collectively the structural robustness and suppleness of the exoskeletons of langoustines with the exact management and longevity of artificial elements.

They achieved this by embedding an elastomer contained in the exoskeleton to manage every of its segments after which mounting it on a motorized base to modulate its stiffness response (extension and flexion). Lastly, the workforce lined the exoskeleton in a silicon coating to strengthen it and lengthen its lifespan.

When mounted on the motorized base, the machine can be utilized to maneuver an object weighing as much as 500 g right into a goal zone. When mounted as a gripping pair, two exoskeletons can efficiently grasp a wide range of objects ranging in dimension and form from a highlighter pen to a tomato. The robotic system may even be used to propel a swimming robotic with two flapping exoskeletal ‘fins’ at speeds of as much as 11 centimeters per second.

After use, the exoskeleton and its robotic base could be separated and a lot of the artificial elements could be reused. “To our information, we’re the primary to suggest a proof of idea to combine meals waste right into a robotic system that mixes sustainable design with reuse and recycling,” says CREATE Lab researcher and first creator Sareum Kim.

One limitation of the method lies within the pure variation in organic constructions; for instance, the distinctive form of every langoustine tail signifies that the two- ‘fingered’ gripper bends barely in a different way on either side. The researchers say this problem would require the event of extra superior artificial augmentation mechanisms like tunable controllers. With such enhancements, the workforce sees potential for future techniques integrating bioderived structural parts, for instance in biomedical implants or bio-system monitoring platforms.

“Though nature doesn’t essentially present the optimum kind, it nonetheless outperforms many synthetic techniques and affords beneficial insights for designing purposeful machines based mostly on elegant ideas,” Hughes summarizes.

Learn the work in full

Lifeless Matter, Residing Machines: Repurposing Crustaceans’ Stomach Exoskeleton for Bio-Hybrid Robots, S. Kim, Ok. Gilday, and J. Hughes, Adv. Sci. (2025).