The future of automated, wireless bioelectronics

Combining the power of soft robotics and biomechanics, wireless bioelectronics can be embedded into living tissue to create a biohybrid robot. However, the smaller these robots become, the harder they are to control, and any type of experimentation with living tissue presents challenges that hinder the field’s development.

Hiroyuki Tetsuka and Minoru Hirano provided a roadmap for the design of stable, scalable, wireless biohybrid robots.

Removing wires from a biohybrid robot allows researchers to stimulate living tissue without mechanically restricting the muscle, even moving toward closed-loop control of these systems. But the perspective also considers the balance of the biological and the synthetic.

“A biohybrid robot needs an environment that keeps its cells healthy, including appropriate oxygen and nutrients, temperature and pH control, and sterile conditions,” Tetsuka said. “These biological requirements have to be considered together with the electronics when designing the overall system.”

The researchers then asked whether biohybrid robots could eventually become autonomous by incorporating aspects of biological systems — sensing, processing, and adaptive functions. This led them to research neural interfaces, “including the possibility of connecting biohybrid robots with brain organoids as one potential approach to biological information processing and adaptive control,” Tetsuka said.

In studying these closed-loop control systems, the researchers found that achieving full robotic autonomy goes beyond adding a new controller or removing wires.

“What we found particularly interesting was that the biological and electronic aspects cannot really be considered separately,” said Tetsuka. “This made it clear to us that there is no single control method that works best for every biohybrid robot — the choice depends on what the robot is designed to do, the type of biological actuator being used, and how much autonomy is needed.”

Source: “Wireless bioelectronic control architectures for muscle-powered biohybrid robotic systems,” by Hiroyuki Tetsuka and Minoru Hirano, APL Bioengineering (2026). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0339053 .