A review: exploring the designs of bio-bots

Abstract

Biohybrid robots (bio-bots), made of biocompatible skeletons with living drives (e.g., biological living tissues or cells), represent a new direction of robotics technology due to their attractive advantages of softness, flexibility, adaptability and biocompatibility, accompanied by the remarkable capabilities of self-assembly, self-healing, and self-replication. This paper provides a brief review of recent advances of bio-bots from a functional view, including walking, swimming and non-locomotion bio-bots, by exploring their structure designs along with their operational principles. The performances of these bio-bots are summarized and compared followed by the discussions of challenges and perspectives, which provide valuable insight and guidance for future developments of bio-bots.