Nobody knows what sleeping mushrooms dream of when their vast mycelial networks flicker and pulse with electrochemical responses akin to those of our own brain cells.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers put a culture of the edible mushroom species Pleurotus eryngii (also known as the king oyster mushroom) in control of a pair of vehicles, which can twitch and roll across a flat surface.

By applying algorithms based on the extracellular electrophysiology of P. eryngii mycelia and feeding the output into a microcontroller unit, the researchers used spikes of activity triggered by a stimulus – in this case, UV light – to toggle mechanical responses in two different kinds of mobile device.

https://youtu.be/5ZkkaM54RH8

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.adk8019

  • Owl [he/him]
    ·
    4 months ago

    More science should be mad art experiments.

    Also, they should put the robots in an otherwise sterile controlled environment, with more possible substrates scattered about, and periodically re-pot any new mushrooms into new robots and re-sterilize the environment. You know, give the mushrooms some time to evolve into this niche.