Abstract
Plants have evolved different mechanisms to disperse from parent plants and improve germination to sustain their survival. The study of seed dispersal mechanisms, with the related structural and functional characteristics, is an active research topic for ecology, plant diversity, climate change, as well as for its relevance for material science and engineering. The natural mechanisms of seed dispersal show a rich source of robust, highly adaptive, mass and energy efficient mechanisms for optimized passive flying, landing, crawling and drilling. The secret of seeds mobility is embodied in the structural features and anatomical characteristics of their tissues, which are designed to be selectively responsive to changes in the environmental conditions, and which make seeds one of the most fascinating examples of morphological computation in Nature. Particularly clever for their spatial mobility performance, are those seeds that use their morphology and structural characteristics to be carried by the wind and dispersed over great distances (i.e. “winged” and “parachute” seeds), and seeds able to move and penetrate in soil with a self-burial mechanism driven by their hygromorphic properties and morphological features. By looking at their motion mechanisms, new design principles can be extracted and used as inspiration for smart artificial systems endowed with embodied intelligence. This mini-review systematically collects, for the first time together, the morphological, structural, biomechanical and aerodynamic information from selected plant seeds relevant to take inspiration for engineering design of soft robots, and discusses potential future developments in the field across material science, plant biology, robotics and embodied intelligence.
Highlights
Seed dispersal is an interesting area for ecology, plant diversity and adaptation, and climate change (Traveset et al, 2014; Johnson et al, 2019)
From an engineering design of dynamic solutions point of view, this study focuses on those seeds whose self-burial and flying abilities allow an efficient 3-D movement in space, making them relevant examples to take inspiration from for innovative soft robots
The study of biological models is necessary to identify and extract key features that are relevant to the design and development of artificial systems (Margheri et al, 2012; Tramacere et al, 2013; Laschi and Mazzolai, 2016)
Summary
Seed dispersal is an interesting area for ecology, plant diversity and adaptation, and climate change (Traveset et al, 2014; Johnson et al, 2019). The movement is instead powered by the intrinsic material and structural features of the seed tissues (Fratzl and Barth, 2009; Abraham, 2018; Abraham and Elbaum, 2013), which endow them with high responsiveness to changing environmental conditions (e.g., humidity and temperature), or the ability to exploit environmental factors as mobility vectors (wind, water, animals) In this sense, seeds represent one of the most interesting and significant examples of morphological computation in Nature, providing a wide collection of physical and mechanical features optimized for system passive flying, landing, crawling and drilling. In the Pelargonium genus, the structure of the awn is thinner and lighter and covered with feather-like hairs compared to the Erodium genus This difference was explained as a condition necessary for the detachment from the columella through wind dispersal instead of being sprung away as Erodium seeds (Abraham and Elbaum, 2013). By using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) investigations, directional hairs-like microstructures were found
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