The U.S. Army is looking into using animal muscle tissue as a means to move robots.

The Army Research Laboratory believes its bots could use real muscle, which allows most living things to move and manipulate their environments, instead of mechanical arms, wheels, tracks, and other systems to travel across the battlefield. The concept, which some might find disturbing, is an example of the new field of "biohybrids."

Today's military robots, particularly ground-based robots, navigate the battlefield on wheels and tracks, methods of locomotion copied over from human-occupied vehicles. But researchers "are reaching a point where they're experiencing diminishing returns in the design of these robots with wheels as their primary locomotor, and batteries as their centralized power system," NextGov reports.