Connecting an In-vitro ‘mini Brain’ tO a Robot with a novel bio-enGineered platform – CIBORG

How to improve the learning and decision-making abilities in robots? This project adopts the radical approach of providing a robot with lab-cultured human ‘mini-brains’ (cerebral organoids or human cortical brain slice). The robot-to-brain connection will be enabled by a novel bioengineered platform developed by the collaboration between a cell biologist, medical doctor, microelectronics engineer, roboticist and neuroscientist, and their teams. The bio-engineering platform will essentially provide the mini-brain with a robot body, that it can use to explore the environment. We will use the platform to develop fundamental sensori-motor learning experiments that will explore the possibility of developing robots controlled by in-vitro brains. We provide the project description and preliminary data to show the feasibility of the approach. The project will provide seminal results that will open up new perspectives for tomorrow’s robotics.