Tech
Artificial tendons give muscle-powered robots a boost
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 appearing today 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 ’19, SM ’21, PhD ’24 and Laura Rosado ’22, SM ’25; 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.
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Tencia Benavidez, a Supernatural user who lives in New Mexico, started her VR workouts during the Covid pandemic. She has been a regular user in the five years since, calling the ability to workout in VR ideal, given that she lives in a rural area where it’s hard to get to a gym or workout outside during a brutal winter. She stuck with Supernatural because of the community and the eagerness of Supernatural’s coaches.
“They seem like really authentic individuals that were not talking down to you,” Benavidez says. “There’s just something really special about those coaches.”
Meta bought Supernatural in 2022, folding it into its then-heavily invested in metaverse efforts. The purchase was not a smooth process, as it triggered a lengthy legal battle in which the US Federal Trade Commission tried to block Meta from purchasing the service due to antitrust concerns about Meta “trying to buy its way to the top” of the VR market. Meta ultimately prevailed. At the time, some Supernatural users were cautiously optimistic, hoping that big bag of Zuckerbucks could keep its workout juggernaut afloat.
“Meta fought the government to buy this thing,” Benavidez says. “All that just for them to shut it down? What was the point?”
I reached out to Meta and Supernatural, and neither responded to my requests for comment.
Waking Up to Ash and Dust
On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Meta has laid off more than 1,000 people across its VR and metaverse efforts. The move comes after years of the company hemorrhaging billions of dollars on its metaverse products. In addition to laying off most of the staff at Supernatural, Meta has shut down three internal VR studios that made games like Resident Evil 4 and Deadpool VR.
“If it was a bottom line thing, I think they could have charged more money,” Goff Johnson says about Supernatural. “I think people would have paid for it. This just seems unnecessarily heartless.”
There is a split in the community about who will stay and continue to pay the subscription fee, and who will leave. Supernatural still has more than 3,000 lessons available in the service, so while new content won’t be added, some feel there is plenty of content left in the library. Other users worry about how Supernatural will continue to license music from big-name bands.
“Supernatural is amazing, but I am canceling it because of this,” Chip told me. “The library is large, so there’s enough to keep you busy, but not for the same price.”
There are other VR workout experiences like FitXR or even the VR staple Beat Saber, which Supernatural cribs a lot of design concepts from. Still, they don’t hit the same bar for many of the Supernatural faithful.
“I’m going to stick it out until they turn the lights out on us,” says Stefanie Wong, a Bay Area accountant who has used Supernatural since shortly after the pandemic and has organized and attended meetup events. “It’s not the app. It’s the community and it’s the coaches that we really, really care about.”
Welcome to the New Age
I tried out Supernatural’s Together feature on Wednesday, the day after the layoffs. It’s where I met Chip and Alisa. When we could stop to catch our breath, we talked about the changes coming to the service. They had played through previous sessions hosted by Jane Fonda or playlists with a mix of music that would change regularly. It seems the final collaboration in Supernatural’s multiplayer mode will be what we played now, an artist series featuring entirely Imagine Dragons songs.
In the session, as we punched blocks while being serenaded by this shirtless dude crooning, recorded narrations from Supernatural coach Dwana Olsen chimed in to hype us up.
“Take advantage of these moments,” Olsen said as we punched away. “Use these movements to remind you of how much awesome life you have yet to live.”
Frankly, it was downright invigorating. And bittersweet. We ended another round, sweaty, huffing and puffing. Chip, Alisa, and I high-fived like crazy and readied for another round.
“Beautiful,” Alisa said. “It’s just beautiful, isn’t it?”
Tech
PSNI resorted to pen and paper after issues with ControlWorks command and control software | Computer Weekly
Unexpected problems in the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s (PSNI’s) ControlWorks software led to police having to resort to manual forms to record calls from the public soon after the software’s introduction in 2019, Computer Weekly has learned.
The force has not reported the incidents to the Northern Ireland Policing Board, which oversees the PSNI, and has not mentioned any incidents with ControlWorks in its annual reports.
While there is no legal duty to report failures with ControlWorks to the Northern Ireland Policing Board, the Policing Board has told Computer Weekly it would expect any serious incidents with ControlWorks to be reported to it.
The PSNI uses ControlWorks as part of its command and control system, for managing, logging and categorising calls received by the emergency services from the public and for dispatching police officers to incidents.
Computer Weekly has learned that the PNSI’s ControlWorks system had technical issues after it first went live in May 2019.
These included slow-downs of the system that required computer systems to be restarted or software to be patched.
On some occasions, police were forced to return to using paper forms to record incidents reported by the public after ControlWorks became unavailable. Information on the forms had to be typed back into the system when the service resumed.
ControlWorks aimed to improve response times
The PSNI announced it was using Capita Communications and Control Solutions’ ControlWorks software in 2018, replacing its 20-year-old Capita Atlas Command and Control System, which had reached the end of its life.
From February 2018, ControlWorks was installed across the PSNI’s three regional contact management centres, before going live in May 2019, but is understood to have had a series of issues during its first few months of operation.
Critical incidents, which affect force-wide availability of ControlWorks, are categorised as P1 or P2. Less serious incidents that do not require urgent remediation are categorised as P3 and P4, Computer Weekly has previously reported.
Computer Weekly understands that the PSNI runs a 24-hour help desk to deal with IT issues, and that it has the ability to escalate incidents with ControlWorks to its IT supplier.
Missing persons search
Computer Weekly understands that a “major issue” with ControlWorks may have delayed information being passed to police officers searching for missing teenager Noah Donohoe, who disappeared from his home in Belfast on 21 June 2020.
Donohoe’s disappearance sparked a massive search operation, as police reviewed hours of CCTV, and hundreds of volunteers joined the search for the vulnerable 14-year-old.
Computer Weekly has learned that on the evening of 23 June 2020, police recorded a “major issue” with ControlWorks that could have led to delays in information being passed to investigators.
Computer Weekly further understands that on the evening of 24 June, a member of the public called police to say they had seen an individual attempting to sell Donohoe’s missing laptop.
This potentially critical information was delayed in being brought to the attention of police officers investigating Donohoe’s disappearance because of a problem with ControlWorks, Computer Weekly has been told.
It is unclear exactly how long the information was delayed by and what its impact on the search for the missing teenager was. But it is understood that detectives on the case reported and noted the delay during the investigation.
The issue with ControlWorks was understood to have been reported during the live investigation at a critical time when Donohoe was missing – two days after he had gone missing, and four days before he was found dead in a Belfast storm drain.
Manchester had serious IT issues
Greater Manchester Police experienced problems when it went live with its Integrated Operational Policing System (iOPS), which included ControlWorks, in July 2019. iOps attempted to integrate Capita’s ControlWorks software with Capita’s PoliceWorks record management software used by police officers for managing day-to-day investigations and intelligence records.
An independent review found serious issues with the project. At one point, police were forced to revert to pen and paper for 72 hours while records were migrated to the new system.
“This consumed considerable time and capacity, causing a duplication of work,” the report found. “In addition, some legacy demand, which included ongoing investigations, did not successfully transfer from the old systems, so could no longer be worked on.”
Greater Manchester Police subsequently announced plans to replace PoliceWorks after concluding it could not be adapted or fixed, but it has continued to use ControlWorks.
The PSNI uses a different record management system to Manchester’s troubled PoliceWorks system. The PSNI signed a £9m contract with the Canadian company NicheRMS to deploy its Records Management System, which records information about people, locations, vehicles, incidents and evidence, in 2006.
NicheRMS keeps duplicate records of reports from the public that are recorded on ControlWorks when they are escalated as an “incident”. This means that should data be lost because of problems with ControlWorks, the PSNI would still have access to duplicate records reported by the public on NicheRMS if they have been escalated as an “incident”.
Policing Board seeks clarification from PSNI
The Northern Ireland Policing Board has confirmed that if a major system disruption or significant information or data loss occurred, the board would expect to be informed.
A spokesperson told Computer Weekly that the board’s Resources Committee, which has oversight responsibility for matters including the PSNI’s technology systems, has asked the PSNI for clarification about the issues raised by Computer Weekly.
A coroner’s inquest into the circumstances of Noah Donohoe’s death is due to begin on 19 January.
The PSNI said it would “not comment on investigative matters while legal proceedings are ongoing”.
“With regards to questions relating to ControlWorks, police can confirm that, to date, there has been no instance of major disruption which has led to data loss,” a spokesperson said.
Capita declined to comment.
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