Eel inspired artificial nerve tissue heralds soft robotics breakthrough

Working with funding from the US Army Research Office, the group, from Brandeis University in Massachusetts, claims that the breakthrough could lead to the development of autonomous soft robots with highly distributed and tightly integrated sensing, actuation, computation and control. The research is published in the UK journal Lab on a Chip

Led by Professor of Physics Dr Seth Fraden, the team drew their inspiration from the sinuous swimming motion of a swimming blue eel and studied how a type of neural network present in the eel, named the Central Pattern Generator (CPG), produces waves of chemical pulses that propagate down the eel's spine to rhythmically drive swimming muscles.

Fraden's lab set about engineering a material that could mimic this 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.