Xenobots are a novel class of entity that straddle the boundaries between living organisms and artificial robots. They are pretty neat.
Xenobot Research Milestones
1. Computer-designed organisms.
By combining AI design methods with a cell-based construction toolkit, a scalable pipeline for designing and creating novel organisms is introduced.
2. Living robot swarms
New motors, sensors, and faster manufacture enable living robot swarms. By training xenobots to self-organize into multi-agent swarms, they can accomplish tasks no single bot could alone.
3. Kinematically Replicating Organisms
A previously unknown form of self-replication in organisms, discovered and controlled by artificial intelligence and evolutionary optimization.
4. Xenomics: a toolkit to study xenobots.
Combining methodologies from computational neuroscience, developmental biology, and information theory, xenomics is a new toolkit for scientists interested in understanding the internal structure of xenobots.
5. Emergent information complexity in xenobots.
The tools of xenomics reveal that xenobots are complex systems in their own right: cells are organized into sophisticated functional connectivity networks, and the bots integrate information over time.