From Plants and Soft Animals—Lessons for a New Generation of Living Machines

Robotics has undergone a major expansion in scope, dimensions and multi-disciplinarity, thanks to the maturity and the advances of the related technologies. From predominantly industrial applications, robots are rapidly challenging other scenarios, being safer and more dependable at homes, workplaces, and natural environments. The application in such unstructured settings requires increased abilities of perception-action delivered by a control architecture which relies on the information on the state of the robot and its surrounding environment, and exploits its learning and body adaptation skills to respond to a continuously changing situation. In a constantly changing world, natural organisms’ life and evolution strategies can provide engineers with the rules to design and develop functional embodiments and energy-efficient adaptive behaviours, that are the keys for artificial machines to better deal with unstructured and challenging environments.<br/>Natural systems’ secret lies in the smart characteristics of how their body is structured, in how they are able to use or preserve energy resources, in how their intelligence is embodied and distributed, and in the synergies that they create each other to effectively adapt, grow and survive.<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/>Specifically, this talk will show recent results in the field of bioinspired soft robotics based on the investigation of plants and soft animals' features, with the double goal to identify and extract the key principles underlying these biological functions and to translate them in a technological solution, and to improve scientific knowledge on these biological systems that we take as models.<br/>Examples will include artificial self-growing roots for soil monitoring, growing robots inspired by climbing plants for infrastructures’ explorations, anchoring systems inspired by plants hooks, soft manipulators inspired by the octopus’ arms for adaptive grasping, biohybrid energy harvesting systems, and self-deployable, biodegradable seed-like soft robots for environmental monitoring.<br/>A new wave of environmentally-responsible robots is envisioned, by merging bioinspired soft robotics, material science, nanocomposite technologies, and environmental science.<br/>These “green robots” will be developed to better integrate into the natural ecosystems and react accordingly to changes by varying their structural, morphological or behavioural features, to be sustainable and operate in natural scenarios in support to the challenge of biodiversity and climate protection.