Biorobotics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Biorobotics is a term that loosely covers the fields of cybernetics, bionics and even genetic engineering as a collective study.
Biorobotics is often used to refer to a real subfield of robotics: studying how to make robots that emulate or simulate living biological organisms mechanically or even chemically. The term is also used in a reverse definition: making biological organisms as manipulatable and functional as robots, or making biological organisms as components of robots.
In the latter sense biorobotics can be referred to as a theoretical discipline of comprehensive genetic engineering in which organisms are created and designed by artificial means. The creation of life from non-living matter for example, would be biorobotics. The field is in its infancy and is sometimes known as synthetic biology or bionanotechnology.
In fiction, the robots featured in Rossum’s Universal Robots, the play that originally coined the term, are presented as artificial biological entities closer to biorobotics than the mechanical objects that the term came to refer to. The replicants in the film Blade Runner would be considered biorobotic in nature: (synthetic) organisms of living tissue and cells yet created artificially. Instead of microchips, their brain is based on ganglions/artificial neurons.