Skip to main content

Cyborg Venus flytraps are here. Don’t worry, they’re not hostile

Just when you think you’ve seen it all, a university in Singapore comes along and creates a half-robot, half-plant Venus flytrap cyborg. That’s what researchers at Nanyang Technological University recently built — and, while it’s unnerving and impressive in equal measure, it could also turn out to be surprisingly useful.

A Venus flytrap is pretty cool in its own right. A rare example of a carnivorous plant that gains part of its nutrients from munching on insects and spiders, the Venus flytrap resembles a set of jaws that close over prey when tiny, tripwire-style stiff hairs on its leaves are triggered. The tasty morsel is trapped inside by the plant’s interlocking teeth, before the Venus flytrap sets about digesting its soon-to-be meal with stomach-style juices.

The cyborg Venus flytrap is that, basically — but augmented with electrodes stuck to the leaves so as to render it controllable via smartphone.

“Plants, for the first time, can now be on-demand operated to do instant tasks,” Xiaodong Chen, President’s Chair Professor in Materials Science and Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, told Digital Trends.

Chen noted that the researchers used a frequency-dependent modulation method to stimulate the flytrap with a high level of accuracy and speed. As can be seen from the above video, it works surprisingly well.

Fly trap
Nanyang Technological University

Feed me, Seymour

But the goal isn’t to create an army of Internet of Things carnivorous robo-plants, like a Little Shop of Horrors revival directed by Jeff Bezos. Instead, it’s a piece of fundamental research that could be used to create more sensitive robo-grippers able to pick up fragile objects that might be harmed by rigid, traditional grippers. In demonstrations, the flytrap was attached to a robot arm and used to hold a piece of wire half a millimeter in diameter.

Chen said that the research could also be used to create thin film patches that may be attached to leaf surfaces to monitor plant stress.

The next phase of the project will involve establishing a way to greatly improve the speed at which the flytrap will reopen after closing.

“The next step is to realize faster reopening of the plant robot,” Chen said. “Though the flytrap closing process can be accurately controlled, it takes hours to reopen. Our next step is to figure out ways to accelerate the reopening process. Furthermore, we would [like to] extend the plant from flytrap to other more common plant species.”

A paper describing the research was recently published in the journal Carnivorous Plant Robots And You. (Just kidding: it was Nature Electronics.)

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
Aptiv’s machine learning-powered radar sees even what you don’t
lyft and aptivs self driving car program has come a long way but not far enough aptiv screen press

Aptiv traveled to CES 2022 to showcase the improvements it has made to its suite of advanced driver assistance systems. It notably leveraged the power of machine learning technology to help its self-driving prototypes detect and classify objects, even those that are out of sight.

Think of a self-driving car as a human being; radars are the eyes and machine learning technology is the brain. Fitting radars to a car's body allows it to scope out the environment it operates in. It can detect that there's a car in front of it, that there's a bike coming the other way, and that there's a traffic light it needs to stop for. These are fairly straightforward tasks that most self-driving prototypes already perform.

Read more
Fortnite is down with players being told they don’t ‘have permission to play’
Statue in Fortnite.

As kids and adults alike enjoy their holiday breaks, one thing they won't be doing, for now, is playing Fortnite. The massively popular battle royale title has gone offline.

While Epic games has previously closed the game's servers to update it, like with its recent Chapter 3 update, the sudden issues preventing players from logging in are not part of the developer's plan.

Read more
These new chips could be good news for Copilot+ PCs
The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus

The first Copilot+ laptops are already out, powered by Qualcomm's impressive new Snapdragon X chip. The first batch of reviews were delayed, and early impressions have observed the hits and misses of the current chips. But a new leak tells us that Qualcomm might have another ace up its sleeve, and there may be hope for these Arm-based Copilot+ PCs yet. What's new? There might be more models of the chip than what we've been privy to so far.

So far, we've seen reviews of the Asus Vivobook S 15, but that's just one of several chips that fall under the Snapdragon X Elite umbrella. According to files for the Adreno GPU driver, there may be not just six, but 10 different models of the Snapdragon X -- and three of those are Plus chips, which we've previously only seen one of.

Read more