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.
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A small group of cyberpunk and mecha anime, manga and role-playing games have used the term bioroid sometimes generally for a partially or fully biological robot or for a breed of genetically engineered human slaves, similar to the replicants in Blade Runner. In 1985 the animated Robotech television series popularized the term when it reused the term from the 1984 Japanese series The Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. An alternative term biot is a portmanteau of "biological robot" and was originally coined by Arthur C. Clarke in his 1972 novel Rendezvous with Rama.
A biological brain, grown from cultured neurons which were originally separated, has been developed as the neurological entity subsequently embodied within a robot body by Kevin Warwick and his team at University of Reading. The brain receives input from sensors on the robot body and the resultant output from the brain provides the robot's only motor signals. The biological brain is the only brain of the robot.[1]
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