Army Scientists Mimic Neural Tissue: Material Could Lead to Future Autonomous Soft Robotics

ARO funds research to initiate scientific and far-reaching technological discoveries in extramural organizations, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations and private industry that may make future American Soldiers stronger and safer.

The research team, led by Professor of Physics Dr. Seth Fraden of Brandeis University, drew inspiration from the mesmerizing sinuous motion of a swimming blue eel and puzzlingly large gap between how natural systems move and the lack of such coordinated and smooth movement in artificial systems.

Our research interests lie squarely in the intersection of physics, chemistry, biology and materials science,” Fraden said. “Our lab is interdisciplinary, but we are also involved in several multi-investigator projects.”

Fraden’s work sought to answer key questions, such as why is there such a void between the animate and inanimate that we never confuse the two, and if engineers could create materials with similar attributes to living organisms, but constructed from inanimate objects, can we do so using only chemicals and eschew use of motors and electronics?

Looking deeper, Fraden studied how a type of neural network present in the eel, named the Central Pattern Generator, produces waves of chemical pulses that propagate down the eel’s spine to rhythmically drive swimming muscles.

Fraden’s lab approached the challenge of engineering a material mimicking the generator by first constructing a control device that produces the same neural activation patterns biologists have observed. There, they created a control system that runs on chemical power, as is done in biology, without resorting to any computer or electromechanical devices, which are the hallmarks of manmade, hard robotic technology.

A breakthrough was made when Fraden and his team realized that the same CPG dynamics could be captured on a non-biological platform if they used a well-known oscillating chemical process known as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. The lab developed state-of-the-art fabrication techniques for soft materials engineering artificial chemical networks at the nanoscale that, altogether, would be capable of producing a wide variety of patterns. Their resulting robust chemical networks produced distributed dynamic patterns identical to the eel’s Central Pattern Generator.

Fraden noted that “the engineering principles they identified are general and can be applied to design a whole range of other Central Pattern Generators, such as those responsible for other autonomous functions, such as the gait of a horse, for example, walk, canter, trot and gallop.”

The research appear as the cover article of the March 7 issue of a U.K. journal, Lab on a Chip, which is a peer-reviewed scientific journal publishing primary research and review articles on any aspect of miniaturization at the micro and nano scale. The work earned distinction as one of the journal’s “hot articles” due to its particularly high scores earned in the scientific review process.