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ARL’s Combat Capabilities Development Command is teaming up with universities in North Carolina to develop studies in bio-hybrid robotics.

The idea is just as fantastical as you may be imagining. ARL wants to fuse living tissue with cold metal to build robots that may be able to gain the agility and versatility of living creatures.

“Bio-hybrid robotics as a field is very young,” Dean Culver, an ARL research scientist, told Federal News Network. “Today’s robot’s primary limitation is power, strength and versatility. They can perform limited tasks for a certain amount of time. But it’s not really on the order of magnitude that an organism can do the same thing. We still don’t have robots that can go into an unknown space and adapt to what they sense. These are all ultimately problems that we feel that either a bio-hybrid or a bioinspired engineering design can tackle.”

What ARL is dreaming up is growing tissue in a lab and then connecting that tissue between linkages in a robot’s joints. This technology could allow robots to be sturdier and adapt faster to terrains instead of relying on the static joints made of synthetic materials.

“One of the real advantages of muscle and the tendons and ligaments associated with the rest of the kinetic chain in organisms is that flexibility lets something go a little bit wrong,” Culver said. “There won’t be a catastrophe. I can slip and adjust a little bit and not fall down.”