Abstract
This paper provides the very first definition of “growing robots”: a category of robots that imitates biological growth by the incremental addition of material. Although this nomenclature is quite new, the concept of morphological evolution, which is behind growth, has been extensively addressed in engineering and robotics. In fact, the idea of reproducing processes that belong to living systems has always attracted scientists and engineers. The creation of systems that adapt reliably and effectively to the environment with their morphology and control would be beneficial for many different applications, including terrestrial and space exploration or the monitoring of disasters or dangerous environments. Different approaches have been proposed over the years for solving the morphological adaptation of artificial systems, e.g., self-assembly, self-reconfigurability, evolution of virtual creatures, plant inspiration. This work reviews the main milestones in relation to growing robots, starting from the original concept of a self-replicating automaton to the achievements obtained by plant inspiration, which provided an alternative solution to the challenges of creating robots with self-building capabilities. A selection of robots representative of growth functioning is also discussed, grouped by the natural element used as model: molecule, cell, or organism growth-inspired robots. Finally, the historical evolution of growing robots is outlined together with a discussion of the future challenges toward solutions that more faithfully can represent biological growth.
Highlights
The generation of a biological organism involves three tightly connected processes: growth, remodeling, and morphogenesis (Taber, 1995)
The concept of growing machines can be attributed to John Von Neumann, when back in the mid twentieth century he discussed the concepts of self-reproductive automata and “complication.” The “concept of complication” expresses the idea that natural organisms reproduce themselves without decreasing complexity, but instead, through evolutionary processes, new systems are more complex than the parent systems
Considering the high level of complexity of natural systems, Von Neumann suggests an approach based on the translation of natural processes into artificial systems by two steps: (I) break ing down the problem into sub-problems, e.g., a single organism is made up of many elementary units; (II) understanding how these individual elements are organized and contribute to the functioning of the whole system. This idea of decomposing a complex organism into smaller and simpler units was later adopted for the first time in robotics by Fukuda et al (1988), who presented his concept of a dynami cally reconfigurable robotic system (DRRS) implemented in CEBOT
Summary
This paper provides the very first definition of “growing robots”: a category of robots that imitates biological growth by the incremental addition of material. This nomenclature is quite new, the concept of morphological evolution, which is behind growth, has been extensively addressed in engineering and robotics. Different approaches have been proposed over the years for solving the morphological adaptation of artificial systems, e.g., self-assembly, self-reconfigurability, evolution of virtual creatures, plant inspiration. The historical evolution of growing robots is outlined together with a discussion of the future challenges toward solutions that more faithfully can represent biological growth
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