A growing soft robot with climbing plant-inspired adaptive behaviors for navigation in unstructured environments.

Self-growing robots are an emerging solution in soft robotics for navigating, exploring, and colonizing unstructured environments. However, their ability to grow and move in heterogeneous three-dimensional (3D) spaces, comparable with real-world conditions, is still developing. We present an autonomous growing robot that draws inspiration from the behavioral adaptive strategies of climbing plants to navigate unstructured environments.

Towards the optimization of passive undulatory locomotion on land: mathematical and physical models.

The current study investigates the body-environment interaction and exploits the passive viscoelastic properties of the body to perform undulatory locomotion. The investigations are carried out using a mathematical model based on a dry frictional environment, and the results are compared with the performance obtained using a physical model. The physical robot is a wheel-based modular system with flexible joints moving on different substrates.

Perspectives on Computation in Plants.

Plants thrive in virtually all natural and human-adapted environments and are becoming popular models for developing robotics systems because of their strategies of morphological and behavioral adaptation. Such adaptation and high plasticity offer new approaches for designing, modeling, and controlling artificial systems acting in unstructured scenarios. At the same time, the development of artifacts based on their working principles reveals how plants promote innovative approaches for preservation and management plans and opens new applications for engineering-driven plant science.

Mechanics and optimization of undulatory locomotion in different environments, tuning geometry, stiffness, damping and frictional anisotropy.

One of the oldest yet most common modalities of locomotion known among limbless animals is undulatory, also recognized for its stability compared to legged locomotion. Multiple forms of active mechanisms, e.g.

A perspective on plant robotics: from bioinspiration to hybrid systems.

As miscellaneous as the Plant Kingdom is, correspondingly diverse are the opportunities for taking inspiration from plants for innovations in science and engineering. Especially in robotics, properties like growth, adaptation to environments, ingenious materials, sustainability, and energy-effectiveness of plants provide an extremely rich source of inspiration to develop new technologies-and many of them are still in the beginning of being discovered. In the last decade, researchers have begun to reproduce complex plant functions leading to functionality that goes far beyond conventional robotics and this includes sustainability, resource saving, and eco-friendliness.

Historical evolution and new trends for soil-intruder interaction modeling.

Soil is a crucial resource for life on Earth. Every activity, whether natural or man-made, that interacts with the sub or deep soil can affect the land at large scales (e.g.

Conditions for the emergence of circumnutations in plant roots.

The plant root system shows remarkably complex behaviors driven by environmental cues and internal dynamics, whose interplay remains largely unknown. A notable example is circumnutation growth movements, which are growth oscillations from side to side of the root apex. Here we describe a model capable of replicating root growth behaviors, which we used to analyze the role of circumnuntations, revealing their emergence I) under gravitropic stress, as a combination of signal propagation and sensitivity to the signal carriers; II) as a result of the interplay between gravitropic and thigmotropic responses; and III) as a behavioral strategy to detect and react to resource gradients.

Optimal control of plant root tip dynamics in soil.

This paper aims to propose a novel approach to model the dynamics of objects that move within the soil, e.g. plants roots.

HyLength: a semi-automated digital image analysis tool for measuring the length of roots and fungal hyphae of dense mycelia.

In plant-fungus phenotyping, determining fungal hyphal and plant root lengths by digital image analysis can reduce labour and increase data reproducibility. However, the degree of software sophistication is often prohibitive and manual measuring is still used, despite being very time-consuming. We developed the HyLength tool for measuring the lengths of hyphae and roots in in vivo and in vitro systems.

Taking inspiration from climbing plants: methodologies and benchmarks-a review.

One of the major challenges in robotics and engineering is to develop efficient technological solutions that are able to cope with complex environments and unpredictable constraints. Taking inspiration from natural organisms is a well-known approach to tackling these issues. Climbing plants are an important, yet innovative, source of inspiration due to their ability to adapt to diverse habitats, and can be used as a model for developing robots and smart devices for exploration and monitoring, as well as for search and rescue operations.

Passive Morphological Adaptation for Obstacle Avoidance in a Self-Growing Robot Produced by Additive Manufacturing.

This article presents strategies for the passive path and morphological adaptation of a plant-inspired growing robot that can build its own body by an additive manufacturing process. By exploiting the soft state of the thermoplastic material used by the robot to build its structure, we analyzed the ability of the robot to change its direction of growth without the need for specific cognition and control processes. Obstacle avoidance is computed by the mechanics from the body-environment interaction.

Characterization of the Growing From the Tip as Robot Locomotion Strategy.

Growing robots are a new class of robots able to move in the environment exploiting a growing from the tip process (movement by growing). Thanks to this property, these robots are able to navigate 3D environments while negotiating confined spaces and large voids by adapting their body. During the exploration of the environment, the tip of the robot is able to move in any direction and can be kinematically considered as a non-holonomic mobile system.

Toward Growing Robots: A Historical Evolution from Cellular to Plant-Inspired Robotics.

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.

Modular Continuum Manipulator: Analysis and Characterization of Its Basic Module.

We present the basic module of a modular continuum arm (soft compliant manipulator for broad applications (SIMBA)). SIMBA is a robotic arm with a hybrid structure, namely a combination of rigid and soft components, which makes the arm highly versatile, dexterous, and robust. These key features are due to the design of its basic module, which is characterized by a three-dimensional workspace with a constant radius around its rotation axis, large and highly repeatable bending, complete rotation, and passive stiffness.

An efficient soil penetration strategy for explorative robots inspired by plant root circumnutation movements.

This paper presents a comparative analysis in terms of energy required by an artificial probe to penetrate soil implementing two different strategies: a straight penetration movement and a circumnutation, which is an oscillatory movement performed by plant roots. The role of circumnutations in plant roots is still debated. We hypothesized that circumnutation movements can help roots in penetrating soil, and validated our assumption by testing the probe at three distinct soil densities and using various combinations of circumnutation amplitudes and periods for each soil.