Demonstration of the robotic gripper made from langoustine tails. 2025 CREATE Lab EPFL CC BY SA.
By Celia Luterbacher
Although many roboticists today turn to nature to inspire their designs, even bioinspired robots are usually fabricated from non-biological materials like metal, plastic and composites. But a new experimental robotic manipulator from the Computational Robot Design and Fabrication Lab (CREATE Lab) in EPFL’s School of Engineering turns this trend on its head: its main feature is a pair of langoustine abdomen exoskeletons.
Although it may look unusual, CREATE Lab head Josie Hughes explains that combining biological elements with synthetic components holds significant potential not only to enhance robotics, but also to support sustainable technology systems.
“Exoskeletons combine mineralized shells with joint membranes, providing a balance of rigidity and flexibility that allows their segments to move independently. These features enable crustaceans’ rapid, high-torque movements in water, but they can also be very useful for robotics. And by repurposing food waste, we propose a sustainable cyclic design process in which materials can be recycled and adapted for new tasks.”
In a paper published in Advanced Science, Hughes and her team demonstrate three robotic applications by augmenting the exoskeletons of langoustines, which had previously been harvested and processed for the food industry, with the precise control and longevity of synthetic components: a manipulator that can handle objects weighing up to 500g, grippers that can bend and grasp various objects, and a swimming robot.
For their study, the CREATE Lab decided to bring together the structural robustness and flexibility of the exoskeletons of langoustines with the precise control and longevity of synthetic components.
They achieved this by embedding an elastomer inside the exoskeleton to control each of its segments and then mounting it on a motorized base to modulate its stiffness response (extension and flexion). Finally, the team covered the exoskeleton in a silicon coating to reinforce it and extend its lifespan.
When mounted on the motorized base, the device can be used to move an object weighing up to 500 g into a target zone. When mounted as a gripping pair, two exoskeletons can successfully grasp a variety of objects ranging in size and shape from a highlighter pen to a tomato. The robotic system can even be used to propel a swimming robot with two flapping exoskeletal ‘fins’ at speeds of up to 11 centimeters per second.
After use, the exoskeleton and its robotic base can be separated and most of the synthetic components can be reused. “To our knowledge, we are the first to propose a proof of concept to integrate food waste into a robotic system that combines sustainable design with reuse and recycling,” says CREATE Lab researcher and first author Sareum Kim.
One limitation of the approach lies in the natural variation in biological structures; for example, the unique shape of each langoustine tail means that the two- ‘fingered’ gripper bends slightly differently on each side. The researchers say this challenge will require the development of more advanced synthetic augmentation mechanisms like tunable controllers. With such improvements, the team sees potential for future systems integrating bioderived structural elements, for example in biomedical implants or bio-system monitoring platforms.
“Although nature does not necessarily provide the optimal form, it still outperforms many artificial systems and offers valuable insights for designing functional machines based on elegant principles,” Hughes summarizes.
Dead Matter, Living Machines: Repurposing Crustaceans’ Abdomen Exoskeleton for Bio-Hybrid Robots, S. Kim, K. Gilday, and J. Hughes, Adv. Sci. (2025).
Smarting from the wild popularity of NanoBanana – the new image maker from Google – ChatGPT’s maker has released a major upgrade of its own.
The verdict from AI enthusiast Grant Harvey, lead writer for The Neuron newsletter: OpenAI has grabbed back the picture-making crown.
It’s once again best overall AI image editor/generator on the market.
For Harvey’s shoot-out analysis between NanoBanana and OpenAI GPT Image 1.5, check-out this excellent once-over.
In other news and analysis on AI writing:
*AI Earns Dubious Distinction for the ‘Word of the Year’: AI ‘slop’ – a label for the torrent of substandard content that is sometimes auto-generated by AI – is now the Word of the Year.
Observes writer Lucas Ropek: “These new tools have even led to what has been dubbed a ‘slop economy,’ in which gluts of AI-generated content can be milked for advertising money.”
Presenters of the award: Publishers of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
*Google Gemini Adds a Key AI Research Tool: Google is currently integrating a key research tool to its Gemini chatbot, which collates up to 50 PDFs or other research docs for you – and then unleashes AI on them to help you analyze everything.
Dubbed Google “NotebookLM,” the tool has been extremely popular with researchers and other thinkers -– and will be even more useful once its integration with the Gemini chatbot is fully rolled-out.
Observes writer Alexey Shabanov: “The update supports multiple notebook attachments, making it possible to bring substantial datasets into Gemini.”
*AI Fables for Kids – Complete With Values: Neo-Aesop has released a new AI app designed to create hyper-personalized Aesop-like fables for kids.
Playing with the app, users can choose their own characters, settings and virtues for each story. In the process, the child reader and his/her favorite animals can also become the heroes in each tale.
Observes Lindsay Hiebert, founder, Neo-Aesop: “There are no ads, no doom-scrolling and no engagement traps. Just stories that invite real conversation between a parent and a child.”
*Star in Your Own AI-Generated Fiction: Ever wish you could auto-generate fiction that features you and your friends as the main characters?
Vivibook has you covered.
Designed as the AI platform for people who want to be the story, Vivibook takes care of all the narrative, the story arc, the chapter breakdowns, the plot twists – as well as the psychological evolution of the characters.
*Major Keyword Generator Integrates Seamlessly With ChatGPT: Writers who spend a great deal of time ensuring their content appears high-up in search engine returns (Search Engine Optimization) just got a big break.
Semrush – a market leader in helping writers generate content keywords designed to attract the search engines – has been fully integrated into ChatGPT.
The integration enables users to access live Semrush data and intelligence without ever needing to leave the ChatGPT interface.
*Turnkey AI Marketing for Small Businesses – At Your Service: Small businesses looking for an all-in-one solution for AI-driven marketing may want to check-out PoshListings.
It’s a turnkey system that offers:
–Web site analysis, along with strategies for improvement
–AI content for articles, ads and social posts
–Multi-channel publishing to Google, social media and local directories
–Automated email and SMS promotion
–Predictive AI analytics
*Daily Summaries of Your Gmail and Calendar – Courtesy of AI: Google is out with a new AI tool – dubbed CC – that serves up daily summaries of everything that pops-up in your Gmail and Google Calendar.
Observes writer Lance Whitney: “By connecting to your Gmail and Google Calendar content, CC can see what awaits you in your inbox and calendar.
“The tool then boils it all down into a game plan for you to follow for the day.”
*Copilot’s Latest Upgrade: A Video Tour: Key ChatGPT competitor Microsoft Copilot is packing more of a punch these days and sporting a host of new features, including:
–Deep, day-to-day knowledge of who you are, what
you do and what your company, team or group does
–Voice summaries of your upcoming workday
–Voice-driven content creation
–Voice-driven email creation
–Agent-driven Web research, in the background
–Integration with Word, Excel and PowerPoint AI agents
–Written financial reports auto-generated from Excel
–Auto-generated, written reports sourced from other Microsoft apps
Essentially: This is an extremely helpful walk-through from The Neuron’s Editor, Corey Noles, which features Callie August, director, Microsoft 365 Copilot.
*AI BIG PICTURE: Free AI from China Keeps U.S. Tech Titans on Their Toes: While still holding a slim lead, major AI players like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are feeling the nip-at-their-heels of ‘nearly as good’ – and free – AI alternatives from China.
Key Chinese players like DeepSeek and Qwen, for example, are within chomping distance of the U.S. marketing leaders — and are Open Source, or freely available for download and tinkering.
One caveat: Researchers have found AI code embedded in some Chinese AI that can be activated to forward your data along to the Chinese Communist Party.
Share a Link: Please consider sharing a link to https://RobotWritersAI.com from your blog, social media post, publication or emails. More links leading to RobotWritersAI.com helps everyone interested in AI-generated writing.
–Joe Dysart is editor of RobotWritersAI.com and a tech journalist with 20+ years experience. His work has appeared in 150+ publications, including The New York Times and the Financial Times of London.
The post ChatGPT’s New AI Image Maker: Number One appeared first on Robot Writers AI.
Smarting from the wild popularity of NanoBanana – the new image maker from Google – ChatGPT’s maker has released a major upgrade of its own.
The verdict from AI enthusiast Grant Harvey, lead writer for The Neuron newsletter: OpenAI has grabbed back the picture-making crown.
It’s once again best overall AI image editor/generator on the market.
For Harvey’s shoot-out analysis between NanoBanana and OpenAI GPT Image 1.5, check-out this excellent once-over.
In other news and analysis on AI writing:
*AI Earns Dubious Distinction for the ‘Word of the Year’: AI ‘slop’ – a label for the torrent of substandard content that is sometimes auto-generated by AI – is now the Word of the Year.
Observes writer Lucas Ropek: “These new tools have even led to what has been dubbed a ‘slop economy,’ in which gluts of AI-generated content can be milked for advertising money.”
Presenters of the award: Publishers of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
*Google Gemini Adds a Key AI Research Tool: Google is currently integrating a key research tool to its Gemini chatbot, which collates up to 50 PDFs or other research docs for you – and then unleashes AI on them to help you analyze everything.
Dubbed Google “NotebookLM,” the tool has been extremely popular with researchers and other thinkers -– and will be even more useful once its integration with the Gemini chatbot is fully rolled-out.
Observes writer Alexey Shabanov: “The update supports multiple notebook attachments, making it possible to bring substantial datasets into Gemini.”
*AI Fables for Kids – Complete With Values: Neo-Aesop has released a new AI app designed to create hyper-personalized Aesop-like fables for kids.
Playing with the app, users can choose their own characters, settings and virtues for each story. In the process, the child reader and his/her favorite animals can also become the heroes in each tale.
Observes Lindsay Hiebert, founder, Neo-Aesop: “There are no ads, no doom-scrolling and no engagement traps. Just stories that invite real conversation between a parent and a child.”
*Star in Your Own AI-Generated Fiction: Ever wish you could auto-generate fiction that features you and your friends as the main characters?
Vivibook has you covered.
Designed as the AI platform for people who want to be the story, Vivibook takes care of all the narrative, the story arc, the chapter breakdowns, the plot twists – as well as the psychological evolution of the characters.
*Major Keyword Generator Integrates Seamlessly With ChatGPT: Writers who spend a great deal of time ensuring their content appears high-up in search engine returns (Search Engine Optimization) just got a big break.
Semrush – a market leader in helping writers generate content keywords designed to attract the search engines – has been fully integrated into ChatGPT.
The integration enables users to access live Semrush data and intelligence without ever needing to leave the ChatGPT interface.
*Turnkey AI Marketing for Small Businesses – At Your Service: Small businesses looking for an all-in-one solution for AI-driven marketing may want to check-out PoshListings.
It’s a turnkey system that offers:
–Web site analysis, along with strategies for improvement
–AI content for articles, ads and social posts
–Multi-channel publishing to Google, social media and local directories
–Automated email and SMS promotion
–Predictive AI analytics
*Daily Summaries of Your Gmail and Calendar – Courtesy of AI: Google is out with a new AI tool – dubbed CC – that serves up daily summaries of everything that pops-up in your Gmail and Google Calendar.
Observes writer Lance Whitney: “By connecting to your Gmail and Google Calendar content, CC can see what awaits you in your inbox and calendar.
“The tool then boils it all down into a game plan for you to follow for the day.”
*Copilot’s Latest Upgrade: A Video Tour: Key ChatGPT competitor Microsoft Copilot is packing more of a punch these days and sporting a host of new features, including:
–Deep, day-to-day knowledge of who you are, what
you do and what your company, team or group does
–Voice summaries of your upcoming workday
–Voice-driven content creation
–Voice-driven email creation
–Agent-driven Web research, in the background
–Integration with Word, Excel and PowerPoint AI agents
–Written financial reports auto-generated from Excel
–Auto-generated, written reports sourced from other Microsoft apps
Essentially: This is an extremely helpful walk-through from The Neuron’s Editor, Corey Noles, which features Callie August, director, Microsoft 365 Copilot.
*AI BIG PICTURE: Free AI from China Keeps U.S. Tech Titans on Their Toes: While still holding a slim lead, major AI players like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are feeling the nip-at-their-heels of ‘nearly as good’ – and free – AI alternatives from China.
Key Chinese players like DeepSeek and Qwen, for example, are within chomping distance of the U.S. marketing leaders — and are Open Source, or freely available for download and tinkering.
One caveat: Researchers have found AI code embedded in some Chinese AI that can be activated to forward your data along to the Chinese Communist Party.
Share a Link: Please consider sharing a link to https://RobotWritersAI.com from your blog, social media post, publication or emails. More links leading to RobotWritersAI.com helps everyone interested in AI-generated writing.
–Joe Dysart is editor of RobotWritersAI.com and a tech journalist with 20+ years experience. His work has appeared in 150+ publications, including The New York Times and the Financial Times of London.
The post ChatGPT’s New AI Image Maker: Number One appeared first on Robot Writers AI.
Claire chatted to Stefano Mintchev from ETH Zürich about robots to explore and monitor the natural environment.
Stefano Mintchev is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Robotics at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. He has a Ph.D. in Bioinspired Robotics from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Italy, and conducted postdoctoral research at EPFL in Switzerland, focused on bioinspired design principles for versatile aerial robots. At ETH Zürich, Stefano leads a research group working at the intersection of robotics and environmental science, developing robust and scalable bioinspired robotic technologies for monitoring and promoting the sustainable use of natural resources.
Researchers have developed artificial tendons for muscle-powered robots. They attached the rubber band-like tendons (blue) to either end of a small piece of lab-grown muscle (red), forming a “muscle-tendon unit.” Credit: Courtesy of the researchers; edited by MIT News.
Our muscles are nature’s actuators. The sinewy tissue is what generates the forces that make our bodies move. In recent years, engineers have used real muscle tissue to actuate “biohybrid robots” made from both living tissue and synthetic parts. By pairing lab-grown muscles with synthetic skeletons, researchers are engineering a menagerie of muscle-powered crawlers, walkers, swimmers, and grippers.
But for the most part, these designs are limited in the amount of motion and power they can produce. Now, MIT engineers are aiming to give bio-bots a power lift with artificial tendons.
In a study which recently appeared in the journal Advanced Science, the researchers developed artificial tendons made from tough and flexible hydrogel. They attached the rubber band-like tendons to either end of a small piece of lab-grown muscle, forming a “muscle-tendon unit.” Then they connected the ends of each artificial tendon to the fingers of a robotic gripper.
When they stimulated the central muscle to contract, the tendons pulled the gripper’s fingers together. The robot pinched its fingers together three times faster, and with 30 times greater force, compared with the same design without the connecting tendons.
The researchers envision the new muscle-tendon unit can be fit to a wide range of biohybrid robot designs, much like a universal engineering element.
“We are introducing artificial tendons as interchangeable connectors between muscle actuators and robotic skeletons,” says lead author Ritu Raman, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering (MechE) at MIT. “Such modularity could make it easier to design a wide range of robotic applications, from microscale surgical tools to adaptive, autonomous exploratory machines.”
The study’s MIT co-authors include graduate students Nicolas Castro, Maheera Bawa, Bastien Aymon, Sonika Kohli, and Angel Bu; undergraduate Annika Marschner; postdoc Ronald Heisser; alumni Sarah J. Wu and Laura Rosado; and MechE professors Martin Culpepper and Xuanhe Zhao.
Muscle’s gains
Raman and her colleagues at MIT are at the forefront of biohybrid robotics, a relatively new field that has emerged in the last decade. They focus on combining synthetic, structural robotic parts with living muscle tissue as natural actuators.
“Most actuators that engineers typically work with are really hard to make small,” Raman says. “Past a certain size, the basic physics doesn’t work. The nice thing about muscle is, each cell is an independent actuator that generates force and produces motion. So you could, in principle, make robots that are really small.”
Muscle actuators also come with other advantages, which Raman’s team has already demonstrated: The tissue can grow stronger as it works out, and can naturally heal when injured. For these reasons, Raman and others envision that muscly droids could one day be sent out to explore environments that are too remote or dangerous for humans. Such muscle-bound bots could build up their strength for unforeseen traverses or heal themselves when help is unavailable. Biohybrid bots could also serve as small, surgical assistants that perform delicate, microscale procedures inside the body.
All these future scenarios are motivating Raman and others to find ways to pair living muscles with synthetic skeletons. Designs to date have involved growing a band of muscle and attaching either end to a synthetic skeleton, similar to looping a rubber band around two posts. When the muscle is stimulated to contract, it can pull the parts of a skeleton together to generate a desired motion.
But Raman says this method produces a lot of wasted muscle that is used to attach the tissue to the skeleton rather than to make it move. And that connection isn’t always secure. Muscle is quite soft compared with skeletal structures, and the difference can cause muscle to tear or detach. What’s more, it is often only the contractions in the central part of the muscle that end up doing any work — an amount that’s relatively small and generates little force.
“We thought, how do we stop wasting muscle material, make it more modular so it can attach to anything, and make it work more efficiently?” Raman says. “The solution the body has come up with is to have tendons that are halfway in stiffness between muscle and bone, that allow you to bridge this mechanical mismatch between soft muscle and rigid skeleton. They’re like thin cables that wrap around joints efficiently.”
“Smartly connected”
In their new work, Raman and her colleagues designed artificial tendons to connect natural muscle tissue with a synthetic gripper skeleton. Their material of choice was hydrogel — a squishy yet sturdy polymer-based gel. Raman obtained hydrogel samples from her colleague and co-author Xuanhe Zhao, who has pioneered the development of hydrogels at MIT. Zhao’s group has derived recipes for hydrogels of varying toughness and stretch that can stick to many surfaces, including synthetic and biological materials.
To figure out how tough and stretchy artificial tendons should be in order to work in their gripper design, Raman’s team first modeled the design as a simple system of three types of springs, each representing the central muscle, the two connecting tendons, and the gripper skeleton. They assigned a certain stiffness to the muscle and skeleton, which were previously known, and used this to calculate the stiffness of the connecting tendons that would be required in order to move the gripper by a desired amount.
From this modeling, the team derived a recipe for hydrogel of a certain stiffness. Once the gel was made, the researchers carefully etched the gel into thin cables to form artificial tendons. They attached two tendons to either end of a small sample of muscle tissue, which they grew using lab-standard techniques. They then wrapped each tendon around a small post at the end of each finger of the robotic gripper — a skeleton design that was developed by MechE professor Martin Culpepper, an expert in designing and building precision machines.
When the team stimulated the muscle to contract, the tendons in turn pulled on the gripper to pinch its fingers together. Over multiple experiments, the researchers found that the muscle-tendon gripper worked three times faster and produced 30 times more force compared to when the gripper is actuated just with a band of muscle tissue (and without any artificial tendons). The new tendon-based design also was able to keep up this performance over 7,000 cycles, or muscle contractions.
Overall, Raman saw that the addition of artificial tendons increased the robot’s power-to-weight ratio by 11 times, meaning that the system required far less muscle to do just as much work.
“You just need a small piece of actuator that’s smartly connected to the skeleton,” Raman says. “Normally, if a muscle is really soft and attached to something with high resistance, it will just tear itself before moving anything. But if you attach it to something like a tendon that can resist tearing, it can really transmit its force through the tendon, and it can move a skeleton that it wouldn’t have been able to move otherwise.”
The team’s new muscle-tendon design successfully merges biology with robotics, says biomedical engineer Simone Schürle-Finke, associate professor of health sciences and technology at ETH Zürich.
“The tough-hydrogel tendons create a more physiological muscle–tendon–bone architecture, which greatly improves force transmission, durability, and modularity,” says Schürle-Finke, who was not involved with the study. “This moves the field toward biohybrid systems that can operate repeatably and eventually function outside the lab.”
With the new artificial tendons in place, Raman’s group is moving forward to develop other elements, such as skin-like protective casings, to enable muscle-powered robots in practical, real-world settings.
This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Defense Army Research Office, the MIT Research Support Committee, and the National Science Foundation.