The thought of living tissue and machinery meshed together brings up images of grotesque cyborgs and far-future sci-fi films, but at the Army Research Laboratory a robot with living, organic muscles may not be that far off. ARL’s Combat Capabilities Development Command is teaming up with universities in North Carolina to develop studies in bio-hybrid robotics. The idea is just as fantastical as you may be imagining. ARL wants to fuse living tissue with cold metal to build robots that may be able to gain the agility and versatility of living creatures. “Bio-hybrid robotics as a field is very young,” Dean Culver, an ARL research scientist, told Federal News Network. “Today’s robot’s primary limitation is power, strength and versatility. They can perform limited tasks for a certain amount of time. But it’s not really on the order of magnitude that an organism can do the same thing. We still don’t have robots that can go into an unknown space and adapt to what they sense. These are all ultimately problems that we feel that either a bio-hybrid or a bioinspired engineering design can tackle.”