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2020-01-01 | Xenobots born. Tufts and the University of Vermont create the first living robots from frog stem cells (Xenopus laevis). The millimetre-scale organisms move, self-repair and gather loose cells into new xenobots. They have no neurons, only cilia.
2021-11-01 | Xenobots reproduce. The team shows kinematic self-replication: xenobots push loose cells into spheres that become working copies of themselves. A form of reproduction no animal or plant uses. The PNAS paper reopens debate about what counts as life.
2022-12-01 | Anthrobots appear. Using xenobot methods, the Wyss Institute builds anthrobots from human tracheal cells: living robots made entirely of human material. They navigate surfaces and show early promise at repairing neurons in lab dishes.
2026-02-01 | Neurobots arrive. Haleh Fotowat and Michael Levin add neuronal precursor cells to xenobots. The neurons mature, branch through the organism and form electrochemical networks with no instruction from the researchers. The biobots wire themselves.
Human-neuron anthrobots (in progress). Levin's lab begins adding human neurons to anthrobots. The goal is programmable living systems for drug delivery, neural repair and environmental monitoring. Fauna Systems targets pollutant detection.
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[icon:DNA] What neurobots ARE
Neurobots are entirely biological. Built from frog embryonic skin cells and neuronal precursor cells, they are self-powered, self-assembled, and capable of moving through water on their own. They trace spiral paths and reverse direction in complex patterns that vary from specimen to specimen. The nervous system that drives this behaviour grew spontaneously: no genetic modification, no external wiring, no surgery.
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[icon:info] What neurobots are NOT
Neurobots are not the robots of science fiction. They are not mechanical, not electronic, not immortal, and not dangerous: they degrade within roughly ten days and cannot survive outside a controlled lab environment. They are also not yet made from human cells. They are proof that a nervous system can self-organise in a novel biological context that evolution never produced, which is the point of the whole experiment.
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:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Michael Levin]
Can a nervous system develop at all in a completely novel context that is not the product of millions of years of natural selection, and if yes, how does it relate to and function within this synthetic biological environment? We now have a partial answer.
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Three Doors That Neurobots Unlock
Medicine. A living organism that can grow its own sensory and motor circuits could one day navigate tissue, detect damage, and deliver a targeted drug without a GPS signal or a battery. Neurobots point toward biological machines that adapt to their environment the same way a body does. Neuroscience. Watching neurons wire themselves in an organism that has never existed before tells researchers things about how nervous systems self-organise that would be nearly impossible to learn from studying brains shaped by 500 million years of vertebrate evolution. It is a blank-slate nervous system in a controllable organism. Philosophy of mind. The neurobots display movement patterns that resemble exploration and avoidance behaviours. They have not been programmed to explore or avoid anything. At what point, the researchers ask, does complexity of behaviour become something that deserves a more careful word than "machine"?
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:LINK
https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202508967
Full paper: Advanced Science, 20 Feb 2026 (Fotowat, Levin et al.)
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:LINK
https://now.tufts.edu/2026/03/16/scientists-create-novel-organism-primitive-nervous-system
Tufts University press release and explainer