About Topic In Short: | |
 | Who: Engineers and researchers at MIT, including lead author Ritu Raman, developed this technology, with co-authors including Professor Martin Culpepper and Professor Xuanhe Zhao. |
What: They developed artificial hydrogel tendons to efficiently connect soft, lab-grown muscle tissue to rigid synthetic skeletons in biohybrid robots, forming a “muscle-tendon unit”. This design addresses the limitation of biohybrid robots' weak and slow muscle-powered motion. | |
How: The hydrogel tendons bridge the mechanical mismatch between soft muscle and rigid skeletons, efficiently transmitting force. This resulted in a robotic gripper that pinched three times faster and with 30 times more force compared to muscle alone, while maintaining performance over thousands of cycles. | |
Overcoming the Mechanical Mismatch in Biohybrid Robotics
Biohybrid robotics, a burgeoning field, relies on combining synthetic mechanical parts with living actuators, typically lab-grown muscle tissue, to create crawlers, walkers, swimmers, and grippers. While muscle tissue offers unique benefits, such as the ability to grow stronger with use and naturally heal when damaged, traditional designs have faced significant limitations.
The primary challenge is the weak and slow motion generated by these bio-bots, as soft muscle tissue is difficult to efficiently attach to rigid synthetic skeletons. This mechanical mismatch causes force to be lost at connection points, and the soft tissue can tear or detach, restricting the robot's ability to perform tasks that require speed, durability, or repeated operation. Consequently, a large amount of muscle material often goes to waste, simply used for attachment rather than motion.
{Researchers have developed artificial tendons for muscle-powered robots. They attached the rubber band-like tendons (blue) to either end of a small piece of lab-grown muscle (red), forming a “muscle-tendon unit.” Photo Credit: Courtesy of the researchers; edited by MIT News}
The Hydrogel Solution from MIT Engineers
Engineers at MIT, led by Assistant Professor Ritu Raman, successfully addressed this challenge by incorporating artificial tendons into their biohybrid designs. Drawing inspiration from the body's natural architecture, the researchers utilized tough and flexible hydrogel—a polymer-based gel—to create rubber band-like tendons. These hydrogel tendons are designed to be "halfway in stiffness between muscle and bone," thereby bridging the mechanical gap between the soft muscle tissue and the rigid skeleton.
The design creates a robust “muscle-tendon unit,” where the tendons connect the central muscle tissue to the robotic skeleton, forming a "muscle-tendon-skeleton" system. By modeling the system as interconnected springs, the research team calculated the optimal stiffness required for the hydrogel tendons to ensure efficient force transfer while simultaneously protecting the soft tissue from tearing.
Dramatic Increases in Power and Efficiency
The performance of the tendon-assisted system dramatically exceeded previous biohybrid designs. In experiments involving a robotic gripper, the device equipped with the muscle-tendon unit pinched three times faster and generated 30 times more force compared to a gripper powered solely by muscle.
Furthermore, the new tendon-based design exhibited high durability, maintaining performance over 7,000 contraction cycles. The addition of artificial tendons increased the robot’s power-to-weight ratio by 11 times, signifying that the system requires far less muscle tissue to perform the same amount of work. This new architecture is highly modular and is envisioned as a universal engineering element that can be adapted to various biohybrid robot designs, including crawlers, walkers, swimmers, and grippers.
Thus Speak Authors/Experts
Ritu Raman, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) at MIT: “We are introducing artificial tendons as interchangeable connectors between muscle actuators and robotic skeletons”. Raman added that this modularity “could make it easier to design a wide range of robotic applications, from microscale surgical tools to adaptive, autonomous exploratory machines”. She also noted that the biological solution is "to have tendons that are halfway in stiffness between muscle and bone, that allow you to bridge this mechanical mismatch between soft muscle and rigid skeleton".
Simone Schürle-Finke, Associate Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at ETH Zürich: “The tough-hydrogel tendons create a more physiological muscle–tendon–bone architecture, which greatly improves force transmission, durability, and modularity”. She believes this development "moves the field toward biohybrid systems that can operate repeatably and eventually function outside the lab".
Conclusion
This advancement in integrating hydrogel tendons into biohybrid robotics marks a critical step toward practical, real-world applications. By stabilizing the connection between living actuators and synthetic skeletons, this technology overcomes key limitations of weak motion and low durability, enabling tendon-assisted muscle actuators to move larger structures safely and reliably. Potential applications include deploying muscle-bound bots as miniature surgical assistants or machines capable of tackling unforeseen tasks in hazardous or remote environments, leveraging the muscle’s inherent ability to heal and gain strength. MIT researchers are now developing protective casings and other components to ensure these robots can operate effectively outside the laboratory.
Hashtag/Keyword/Labels List
#BiohybridRobotics #ArtificialTendons #Hydrogel #MITEngineering #MusclePoweredRobots #Actuators #RoboticsInnovation #MechE #PowerToWeightRatio #SurgicalRobots
References/Resources List
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