scientists have created the first-ever living robots that can reproduce

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Made from frog cells, the computer-designed organisms, created by a US team, gather single cells inside a Pac-Man-shaped 'mouth' and release 'babies' that look and move like their parents.

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At the time, they showed that the bots were programmed to perform a range of tasks including delivering medicine directly to a point in the body. This new generation – Xenobots 3.0 – uses stem cells from the same frog species. Xenobots 3.0 can gather hundreds of single cells, compress them and assemble them into 'babies' released from their Pac-Man-shaped mouths. A few days later, these 'babies' become new Xenobots that look and move just like their 'parents'. And then these new Xenobots can go out, find cells, and build copies of themselves – and the process happens over and over again. In a Xenopus laevis frog, these embryonic stem cells would usually develop into skin. 'They would be sitting on the outside of a tadpole, keeping out pathogens and redistributing mucus,' said Levin. 'But we're putting them into a novel context. We're giving them a chance to reimagine their multicellularity. 'These cells have the genome of a frog, but, freed from becoming tadpoles, they use their collective intelligence, a plasticity, to do something astounding.

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These can make children but then the system normally dies out after that,' said Sam Kriegman at Tuft's. 'It's very hard, actually, to get the system to keep reproducing.' So, the team used a computer – specifically an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm on the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at UVM. The algorithm was able to test billions of body shapes in simulation – triangles, squares, pyramids, starfish – to find ones that replicate. 'We asked the supercomputer at UVM to figure out how to adjust the shape of the initial parents, and the AI came up with some strange designs after months of chugging away, including one that resembled Pac-Man,' said Kriegman. 'It's very non-intuitive. It looks very simple, but it's not something a human engineer would come up with. Why one tiny mouth? Why not five? We sent the results to Doug and he built these Pac-Man-shaped parent Xenobots.

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In response to any ethical concerns the public might have, the team stress Xenobots are entirely contained in a lab, are easily extinguished, and are vetted by federal, state and institutional ethics experts. 'This is an ideal system in which to study self-replicating systems,' said Bongard. 'We have a moral imperative to understand the conditions under which we can control it, direct it, douse it, exaggerate it. It's important, for society as a whole, that we study and understand how this works.'

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