Constructing living buildings: a review of relevant technologies for a novel application of biohybrid robotics.

Mary Katherine Heinrich,Thomas Schmickl,Heiko Hamann,Sebastian Von Mammen,Wojciech Kwiatkowski,Mohammad Divband Soorati,Tomasz Skrzypczak,Mostafa Wahby,Payam Zahadat,Kasper Stoy,Daniel Nicolas Hofstadler,Rafał Krela,Phil Ayres

doi:10.1098/rsif.2019.0238

Abstract

Biohybrid robotics takes an engineering approach to the expansion and exploitation of biological behaviours for application to automated tasks. Here, we identify the construction of living buildings and infrastructure as a high-potential application domain for biohybrid robotics, and review technological advances relevant to its future development. Construction, civil infrastructure maintenance and building occupancy in the last decades have comprised a major portion of economic production, energy consumption and carbon emissions. Integrating biological organisms into automated construction tasks and permanent building components therefore has high potential for impact. Live materials can provide several advantages over standard synthetic construction materials, including self-repair of damage, increase rather than degradation of structural performance over time, resilience to corrosive environments, support of biodiversity, and mitigation of urban heat islands. Here, we review relevant technologies, which are currently disparate. They span robotics, self-organizing systems, artificial life, construction automation, structural engineering, architecture, bioengineering, biomaterials, and molecular and cellular biology. In these disciplines, developments relevant to biohybrid construction and living buildings are in the early stages, and typically are not exchanged between disciplines. We, therefore, consider this review useful to the future development of biohybrid engineering for this highly interdisciplinary application.

Highlights

Biohybrid robotic construction, a potentially broad field, couples interrelated engineered systems and biological systems
We review robots that interact with biological organisms on various scales, including organisms that might not be directly applicable to the task of construction, as their approaches to interaction could be extended in useful ways
We find that support for ecosystems, soil remediation and biodiversity have often been proposed as key targets and challenges, such as by Mohamed et al [148] to combat desertification with robots, but that examples of successful technological implementations remain a gap in the literature, in the topic of biohybrid living buildings

Summary

Introduction

A potentially broad field, couples interrelated engineered systems and biological systems. In this review, we look to biohybrid robotics not as a form of bioinspiration, but as a subset of robotic hybrid societies (see [5]), in which biological organisms and robotic elements perform collective behaviours in a self-organizing way With this understanding, we can define biohybrid living buildings as those where robotic, mechanical and live biological elements—potentially with user interaction— collectively accomplish built structures for human occupancy. For buildings where living organisms are involved in construction, we identify the essential challenge to be steering biological growth or deposition into shapes or patterns that perform building functions These can include the structural system ( perhaps of multi-storey height) and building envelope functions such as shading, thermal insulation, moisture barrier, air barrier and delivery of building utilities. In order to guide and shape biological elements during construction, robots might indirectly influence the organisms through the construction and manipulation of mechanical scaffolds, or directly influence them by providing stimuli specific to the species

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Conclusion