Bongard told CNN that while the behaviour as initially observed was rare and situation-specific, the team used the supercomputer to test billions of body shapes to determine the ideal form for the collection it ended up spitting out something that looked a lot like Pac-Man. Eventually, when enough stem cells were collected, those clumps became new xenobots. The team observed the xenobots, which are made from around 3,000 stem cells each, moving around a petri dish to collect stray stem cells and form them into clumps. Levin told CNN that the method, called kinetic replication, left him “astounded.” In the new paper, researchers from the two universities as well as Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering reported that the xenobots are autonomously making more of themselves using a method previously unknown to be used by any animal or plant species. “This technology makes it clear that we have some important knowledge gaps around the concepts of robot, machine, organism, program, etc.” “Defining ‘robot’ was never easy, although older technologies sort of obscured that fact and made it seem like we knew what a good definition of ‘robot’ was and how one differed from amoebas, bacteria, fish, humans, etc.,” study author Michael Levin told Gizmodo via email. While their lifetimes can be extended with a nutrient-rich environment, afterwards they inevitably biodegrade. … Specialised cells were then grown and meticulously assembled to match the form designed by the computer.” The xenobots are capable of living for days to weeks in an aquatic environment using the energy stored in their cells. As Gizmodo reporter George Dvorsky wrote last year, “Using an evolutionary algorithm, the researchers devised thousands of possible designs for their novel lifeform, with the capacity for unidirectional locomotion being a fundamental physical requirement. The xenobots are programmable in the sense that their rudimentary behaviours are mostly pre-determined by their initial shapes. Joshua Bongard, a University of Vermont computer scientist and robotics expert, referred to them in a press release last January as “novel living machines” that are a “new class of artefact: a living, programmable organism.”

The xenobots are genetically unmodified, cultivated stem cell bundles of the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis. The robots in question aren’t little constructions of silicon and metal - instead, they’re biological machines called xenobots that University of Vermont and Tufts University researchers first described last year.

Researchers who developed what they say are the world’s first living robots now report they can reproduce in an unprecedented way, according to a peer-reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.

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