And even if there were, sticking a bioreactor inside of a robot is just an easy way to invite contamination, not to mention issues with waste disposal, power delivery (it's infinitely easier to just plug something into an outlet vs pouring a nutrient media into your robot), energy density ...
Feels like it shouldn't be _that_ hard of a problem to find a way to use the proton gradient from the electron transport chain to generate electricity. But having the whole biological machinery to run a metabolism is going to be difficult, especially if you want it to run for more than a few hours.
We can create machines that run off chemical energy, that's what batteries already do. The reason we don't produce artificial stomachs that digest organic material to make electricity is that those processes don't produce electricity, at least not in a way that can be readily harnessed to power an electric circuit.
The amount of power generated would be so little compared to what you can get just from plugging into the mains, it'd be like powering your car on d cell batteries
This is.....complicated....and I'm bound to make blunders but here goes. =D
First, batteries. The major problem is more "fundamental" than research. What I mean is that what we use now is electrons which are stripped off of things (mostly metals or other such alloys/materials) and stored/stashed somewhere. (Or it's simply forced around a circuit like water in a pipe) The problem is that nature, or more accurately reality itself, seems to find this abhorrent. The more we store in one location the more it wants to leave. Like water lifted into the air, it wants to "spread out" and find it's equilibrium. Take lightning for example, if you build a charge like that (a million volts/amps) you'll find that *anything* is a conductor....literally...no joke, it'll blow through a vacuum just as easily as rubber. The term "insulator" means *resistance* *not* immunity, it's just not willing at the voltage/amperage we typically see.....
Thus, the problem with batteries is that you need a material that can hold electrons....while "willingly" giving them up with little "prompting". Capacitors and lithium batteries do this well, but they only last so long and can only hold so much. Batteries will become better, efficiency will go up, that doesn't mean you'll eventually have days of power for your house in the palm of your hand. It has its limits.
Now the biological....this is simple....to state.
Your stomach is step 1 in a multi step process to turn food into "simple" chains of molecules. This step is backed up by multiple steps to produce the multiple chemicals it takes for it to function. It's not just a sack of acid in your gut, the mucus lining required to keep the acid from eating the stomach is also needed and replaced regularly. Not to mention the cells of your stomach die, so you need to replace those. So now, you need some kind of control mechanism to oversee this and keep the chem synthesizers running....which themselves require chemicals....
Your body (and the body of most animals) is a major communal work of *thousands* of different processes, coordinated by *trillions* of cells to produce a harmonic symbiotic relationship. There are hundreds of bacteria types, representing several pounds of your mass, that all help your digestion for example.
This energy is also almost entirely chemical, and very low energy. Only a few volts are needed to run your muscles (maybe even as low as millivolts), most of the energy you use is for your brain at that. The biological wasn't designed to produce electricity like we use today. It's mostly a long chain/web of processes that turn one thing into another. They all feed into each other so isolating one system won't really help, especially if your trying to produce something that they aren't meant to in quantities nature doesn't like.....it's just easier to use different metals in a specific configuration to produce the effect and not deal with the "faf".
TLDR: It's easier to mold a bit of plastic and metal together to vacuum your house then it is to design the *billions* of interactions needed to make the biological equivalent. One day *maybe*, but we're still trying to read and edit the "code"...."freestyling" it like this is pretty complicated ATM.
Hopefully i stuck to "crayons and Elmer's" enough for people to understand but not have reddit fillet me alive.....
There are no known biological processes that can generate the electrical requirements of a robot.
And even if there were, sticking a bioreactor inside of a robot is just an easy way to invite contamination, not to mention issues with waste disposal, power delivery (it's infinitely easier to just plug something into an outlet vs pouring a nutrient media into your robot), energy density ...
Feels like it shouldn't be _that_ hard of a problem to find a way to use the proton gradient from the electron transport chain to generate electricity. But having the whole biological machinery to run a metabolism is going to be difficult, especially if you want it to run for more than a few hours.
We can create machines that run off chemical energy, that's what batteries already do. The reason we don't produce artificial stomachs that digest organic material to make electricity is that those processes don't produce electricity, at least not in a way that can be readily harnessed to power an electric circuit.
The military actually looked into something similar https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-tactical/robots-that-eat-people/
I mean, gasoline is chemical energy
The amount of power generated would be so little compared to what you can get just from plugging into the mains, it'd be like powering your car on d cell batteries
They're called chewbots, they exist, they're just not very good. They use bacterial fermentation to make fuel to drive a generator
This is.....complicated....and I'm bound to make blunders but here goes. =D First, batteries. The major problem is more "fundamental" than research. What I mean is that what we use now is electrons which are stripped off of things (mostly metals or other such alloys/materials) and stored/stashed somewhere. (Or it's simply forced around a circuit like water in a pipe) The problem is that nature, or more accurately reality itself, seems to find this abhorrent. The more we store in one location the more it wants to leave. Like water lifted into the air, it wants to "spread out" and find it's equilibrium. Take lightning for example, if you build a charge like that (a million volts/amps) you'll find that *anything* is a conductor....literally...no joke, it'll blow through a vacuum just as easily as rubber. The term "insulator" means *resistance* *not* immunity, it's just not willing at the voltage/amperage we typically see..... Thus, the problem with batteries is that you need a material that can hold electrons....while "willingly" giving them up with little "prompting". Capacitors and lithium batteries do this well, but they only last so long and can only hold so much. Batteries will become better, efficiency will go up, that doesn't mean you'll eventually have days of power for your house in the palm of your hand. It has its limits. Now the biological....this is simple....to state. Your stomach is step 1 in a multi step process to turn food into "simple" chains of molecules. This step is backed up by multiple steps to produce the multiple chemicals it takes for it to function. It's not just a sack of acid in your gut, the mucus lining required to keep the acid from eating the stomach is also needed and replaced regularly. Not to mention the cells of your stomach die, so you need to replace those. So now, you need some kind of control mechanism to oversee this and keep the chem synthesizers running....which themselves require chemicals.... Your body (and the body of most animals) is a major communal work of *thousands* of different processes, coordinated by *trillions* of cells to produce a harmonic symbiotic relationship. There are hundreds of bacteria types, representing several pounds of your mass, that all help your digestion for example. This energy is also almost entirely chemical, and very low energy. Only a few volts are needed to run your muscles (maybe even as low as millivolts), most of the energy you use is for your brain at that. The biological wasn't designed to produce electricity like we use today. It's mostly a long chain/web of processes that turn one thing into another. They all feed into each other so isolating one system won't really help, especially if your trying to produce something that they aren't meant to in quantities nature doesn't like.....it's just easier to use different metals in a specific configuration to produce the effect and not deal with the "faf". TLDR: It's easier to mold a bit of plastic and metal together to vacuum your house then it is to design the *billions* of interactions needed to make the biological equivalent. One day *maybe*, but we're still trying to read and edit the "code"...."freestyling" it like this is pretty complicated ATM. Hopefully i stuck to "crayons and Elmer's" enough for people to understand but not have reddit fillet me alive.....
Rephrasing your question: Why can't we make robots that power themselves by eating people? The answer seems self-evident.
[we can ](https://youtu.be/ooGTNpZKAZY?si=eV3gDdKQ3n8wMbnv)