Sharjah24 – Reuters: U.S. scientists who made the world's first computer-designed living robots said on Tuesday (November 30) that the 'Pac Man' shaped organisms are capable of self-replication.

About the size of poppy seeds, the tiny 'Xenobots' are designed by artificial intelligence and built from frog cells. The scientific team, from the University of Vermont, Tufts University and Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, discovered that the organisms are capable of finding and gathering hundreds of loose frog cells together to assemble Xenobot 'children'. The offspring can go on to reproduce themselves.

"The AI came up with a design that is much more replicative, and that design looks like a Pac-Man. It's a pretty simple circular object. It's got a little wedge cut out of it. And when these nine Pac-Men move around in the dish, they unintentionally get cells caught in their quote unquote 'mouths'. They push those cells into larger piles, and larger piles become larger and stronger and faster moving children," said Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research.

Bongard said the reproduction method was entirely new, unlike the way any existing plant or animal makes copies of itself.

In the future, the Xenobots could be used in medical applications, Bongard said, although any practical use would be strictly regulated, because the cells come from animals.

"It may be in the long term, we're able to create biobots from human cells, and they might actually have medical applications. You might be able to ingest one of these bots and have it do useful work inside the body. In the much more near term, it's probably going to be underwater applications. These are, after all, frog cells, they're perfectly happy in freshwater. You can imagine them inspecting root systems in vertical farms or hydroponic plants, reducing the cost of producing freshwater and desalination facilities, helping with wastewater treatment, sewage. Anything underwater, they may be useful in the not too distant future," he said.

The research was published on Monday (November 29) in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).