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

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.

Photomorphogenesis for robot self-assembly: adaptivity, collective decision-making, and self-repair.

Self-assembly in biology is an inspiration for engineered large-scale multi-modular systems with desirable characteristics, such as robustness, scalability, and adaptivity. Previous works have shown that simple mobile robots can be used to emulate and study self-assembly behaviors. However, many of these studies were restricted to rather static and inflexible aggregations in predefined shapes, and were limited in adaptivity compared to that observed in nature.