Abstract
It has been 10 years since the publication of the first article looking at plants as a biomechatronic system and as model for robotics. Now, roboticists have started to look at plants differently and consider them as a model in the field of bioinspired robotics. Despite plants have been seen traditionally as passive entities, in reality they are able to grow, move, sense, and communicate. These features make plants an exceptional example of morphological computation - with probably the highest level of adaptability among all living beings. They are a unique model to design robots that can act in- and adapt to- unstructured, extreme, and dynamically changing environments exposed to sudden or long-term events. Although plant-inspired robotics is still a relatively new field, it has triggered the concept of growing robotics: an emerging area in which systems are designed to create their own body, adapt their morphology, and explore different environments. There is a reciprocal interest between biology and robotics: plants represent an excellent source of inspiration for achieving new robotic abilities, and engineering tools can be used to reveal new biological information. This way, a bidirectional biology-robotics strategy provides mutual benefits for both disciplines. This mini-review offers a brief overview of the fundamental aspects related to a bioengineering approach in plant-inspired robotics. It analyses the works in which both biological and engineering aspects have been investigated, and highlights the key elements of plants that have been milestones in the pioneering field of growing robots.
Highlights
How we see plants has changed significantly, as has the importance of protecting them for the benefit of the entire terrestrial ecosystem (Baluška and Mancuso, 2020)
To aid the robotic design, Sinibaldi et al (2013) followed a bioengineering approach to model the dynamics of osmotic actuation and represent a formal expression of scaling laws for the physical parameters necessary for the actuation strategy: characteristic time, maximum force, peak power, power density, cumulative work and energy density, role of volume-surface aspect ratio
The Venus flytrap is an interesting model for robotic components and artificial materials, which have been recently deeply reviewed by Esser et al (2020)
Summary
How we see plants has changed significantly, as has the importance of protecting them for the benefit of the entire terrestrial ecosystem (Baluška and Mancuso, 2020). Robotics has contributed to this change in perspective by starting to mimic plants at both components and system level (Mazzolai et al, 2010, 2011; Sadeghi et al, 2014, 2020; Hawkes et al, 2017; Nahar et al, 2017; Wooten and Walker, 2018; Must et al, 2019; Bolt et al, 2020; Geer et al, 2020) This mini-review focuses on the vision of “science for robotics and robotics for science,” to highlight the results of a bioengineering approach in simultaneously driving innovative technological design and obtaining new biological insights
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