In a remarkable feat reminiscent of science fiction, a team of researchers from the University of Tokyo has successfully integrated living, lab-grown skin onto a bio-hybrid robot's face, allowing it to express three-dimensional facial movements, including lifting its cheeks in a subtle smile. This pioneering development represents a significant advancement in the quest to create androids that closely resemble humans, ultimately aiming to include sweat glands, pores, blood vessels, and other features to enhance the skin's quality and fuse it with muscles for changing expressions.
Dr. Shoji Takeuchi, a professor of machine engineering at the University of Tokyo and a member of the research team, emphasized the importance of achieving an invisible binding structure for creating robots with human-like appearances. The team's previous work involved cultivating living skin from human cells and designing a robotic finger with self-healing skin but faced challenges with visible anchors that disrupted the illusion of natural skin movement. To overcome this, the researchers focused on replicating human skin ligaments, which are collagen structures that connect the skin to underlying tissues and bones, by drilling V-shaped holes on the robot's surface and applying a solution containing dermal cells to bind the skin and mechanical frame seamlessly.
For the bio-hybrid robot to exhibit a range of expressive facial movements, such as different smiles, an increase in the number of adhesive holes on its face is necessary. Nonetheless, the team faces the challenge of ensuring proper binding in smaller holes, as the difficulty in allowing the solution to penetrate effectively is a hurdle that needs addressing in their future endeavors. The study detailing this groundbreaking research has been published in the academic journal Cell Reports Physical Science, showcasing the potential for bio-hybrid robots with living skin to revolutionize the field of robotics and artificial intelligence.