Bioinspired design of a tissue-engineered ray with machine learning.

Journal: Science robotics
PMID: 39937888

Abstract

In biomimetic design, researchers recreate existing biological structures to form functional devices. For biohybrid robotic swimmers assembled with tissue engineering, this is problematic because most devices operate at different length scales than their naturally occurring counterparts, resulting in reduced performance. To overcome these challenges, here, we demonstrate how machine learning-directed optimization (ML-DO) can be used to inform the design of a biohybrid robot, outperforming other nonlinear optimization techniques, such as Bayesian optimization, in the selection of high-performance geometries. We show how this approach can be used to maximize the thrust generated by a tissue-engineered mobuliform miniray. This results in devices that can swim at the millimeter scale while more closely preserving natural locomotive scaling laws. Overall, this work provides a quantitatively rigorous approach for the engineering design of muscular structure-function relationships in an automated fashion.

Authors

  • John F Zimmerman
    Disease Biophysics Group, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02134, USA.
  • Daniel J Drennan
    Disease Biophysics Group, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02134, USA.
  • James Ikeda
    Disease Biophysics Group, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02134, USA.
  • Qianru Jin
    Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, United States.
  • Herdeline Ann M Ardoña
    Disease Biophysics Group, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02134, USA.
  • Sean L Kim
    Disease Biophysics Group, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02134, USA.
  • Ryoma Ishii
    Disease Biophysics Group, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02134, USA.
  • Kevin Kit Parker
    Disease Biophysics Group, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Sogang-Harvard Research Center for Disease Biophysics, Sogang University, Seoul 121-742, Korea. kkparker@seas.harvard.edu.

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