In a potential breakthrough for regenerative medicine, scientists have created the first-ever living robots that can reproduce. The millimetre-sized living machines, called Xenobots 3.0, are neither traditional robots nor a species of animal, but living, programmable organisms. Made from frog cells, the computer-designed organisms, created by a US team, gather single cells inside a Pac-Man-shaped'mouth' and release'babies' that look and move like their parents. Self-replicating living bio-robots could enable more direct, personalised drug treatment for traumatic injury, birth defects, cancer, ageing and more. Xenobots 3.0 can gather hundreds of single cells, compress them and assemble them into'babies' released from their Pac-Man-shaped mouths Xenobots are neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal, but a living, programmable organism.

A remarkable combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and biology has produced the world's first "living robots." This week, a research team of roboticists and scientists published their recipe for making a new lifeform called xenobots from stem cells. The term "xeno" comes from the frog cells (Xenopus laevis) used to make them. One of the researchers described the creation as "neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal," but a "new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism." Xenobots are less than 1 millimeter long and made of 500-1,000 living cells.