Soft Adaptive Robots Inspired by Nature

Natural organisms are adaptive, constantly learning and evolving. Since the dawn of life on Earth 3.8 billion years ago, natural species have evolved behaviors with characteristics suited to survive in their environment and to sustain life for generations. Perfection is not nature’s goal. Nature focuses on evolution. Therefore, nature experiments, re-combines the existing and adapts according to results. Thus, why are roboticists looking at natural organisms for the robot revolution? By looking at natural organisms’ life and evolution strategies, nature can provide engineers with the rules to design and develop functional embodiments and energy-efficient behaviors, which are the keys for artificial machines to better deal with unstructured and challenging environments.<br/>With this vision, our approach is to take inspiration from plants and soft animals in order to design robots with high morphological adaptability, distributed sensory systems, as well as energy-saving mechanisms.<br/>More specifically, in this talk, I will explain how soft animals and plants offer new insights to generate new multi-functional materials for morphological adaptation and computation, mechanisms for moving-by-growing, strategies for climbing and adhesion, multi-sensory information processing and distributed architecture of functionalities, as well as new forms of energy. Examples will include recent advances in artificial self-growing robots, technologies and mechanisms for adaptive anchoring, soft manipulators for adaptive grasping, and biodegradable robots.These eco-robots will find applications for environmental exploration, monitoring, precision agriculture, and for improving basic knowledge on natural phenomena.