WIRED WITH MUSHROOMS
Researchers at Cornell are harnessing the signal power of mycelia to activate robots.
Written by Michael Abrams
Anand Kumar Mishra adjusts one of the two biohybrid robots that the team built: a four-wheeled robot that can start or stop after exposure to ultraviolet light. Photo: Charissa King-O'Brien, Cornell University
FUNGI OF THE WORLD do many astounding and essential things. They break down wood, communicate with trees, delight gourmands, send psychonauts on hallucinogenic journeys, and kill the occasional ignoramus with an adventurous appetite. And now they can add another line to their resumes: They can control robots.
“They have action potential,” said Anand Kumar Mishra, a research associate in the Organic Robotics Lab at Cornell University, and lead author of the paper, “Sensorimotor control of robots mediated by electrophysiological measurements of fungal mycelia,” published in Science Robotics in 2024. “They can be useful because they have this bioelectric signaling that comes from ionic channels.”
Inspired by a BBC documentary on mushrooms, Mishra decided he would put that fungal signaling to use in a robot. To do so, he threw himself into the literature. Bioelectric signaling in animal systems, he found, is thoroughly understood, while biologists have known about electric signals in plants since Darwin first recorded them in the Venus flytrap.
But in the fungal kingdom, little is understood. How a fungus might send a signal about the soil, the humidity, or the proximity of a host remains unknown, as is exactly what’s going on in a mushroom’s ionic channels.
Thankfully, though, a mushroom’s response to UV light produces a large signal that is relatively easy to read.
Biohybrid robots are controlled by electrical impulses in mushrooms. Video by Cornell University
So, Mishra ordered a King Oyster mushroom growing kit on Amazon. But unlike most purchasers of said spores, it was not the edible fruiting body that he was after, but the mycelia, the long root-like threads that branch and grow underground. After growing his own for a while, he contacted a professor of plant pathology and plant-microbe biology, Kathie Hodge, who taught him how to grow mycelia quickly and cleanly in large batches.
Mishra did not process the mycelia that he cultivated with his new skills.
“One of our motivations was to make it as easy as possible,” he said. “We wanted to make sure that anyone can use it, especially engineers, who don’t like doing cumbersome culture processes.”
“I think we have demonstrated the true potential of the system. Now we want to know the fungus a little bit better—and then try to move to the next step.”
—Anand Kumar Mishra, research associate, Organic Robotics Laboratory, Cornell University Photo: Charissa King-O'Brien, Cornell University
With mycelia in hand, he simply stuck an electrode in it.
After tweaking the electrode/mycelia interface so that it would read just the signal and not pick up noise—a nearly three-year endeavor—he eventually had a tool that could register the signal the fungus sent every time it was exposed to UV light. Then it was just a matter of building a couple of robots, which is a comparatively easy affair.
Mishra built two. One is a simple four-wheeled, copper-wrapped, wagon-like robot that can start or stop after exposure to UV. The other is something like a five-legged starfish—with a flat mycelia-filled dish for a head—that, after being hit with the UV, can hop up from a flat position and jitter across the floor. Both are cute, in their way, but are ultimately there just to flaunt the power of the fungus.
“This showed the versatility of the electrical signaling and how it is independent of the type of locomotion,” Mishra said. “It doesn’t matter what kind of system you are integrating it with—that’s why we demonstrated both kinds of locomotion.”
Mishra hopes that eventually mycelia signaling can be used in agriculture. A system like the one he’s developed could detect the presence of harmful chemicals, or, perhaps, it could activate an irrigation system when the weather has been too dry for too long. It could also continue to work in radioactive environments where humans would rather not tread.
In the short term, Mishra is hoping to understand the nature of the signal more thoroughly.
“I think we have demonstrated the true potential of the system,” he said. “Now we want to know the fungus a little bit better—and then try to move to the next step.”
Michael Abrams is a technology writer in Westfield, N.J.
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