Animal-robot interaction-an emerging field at the intersection of biology and robotics.

The field of animal-robot and organism-robot interaction systems (ARIS, ORIS) is a currently rapidly emerging field in biorobotics. In this special issue we aim for providing a comprehensive overview of the cutting-edge advancements and pioneering breakthroughs within this scientific and engineering discipline. Therefore, we collected scientific articles that delineate and expound upon the complexity of these remarkable biohybrid systems.

Social Integrating Robots Suggest Mitigation Strategies for Ecosystem Decay.

We develop here a novel hypothesis that may generate a general research framework of how autonomous robots may act as a future contingency to counteract the ongoing ecological mass extinction process. We showcase several research projects that have undertaken first steps to generate the required prerequisites for such a technology-based conservation biology approach. Our main idea is to stabilise and support broken ecosystems by introducing artificial members, robots, that are able to blend into the ecosystem's regulatory feedback loops and can modulate natural organisms' local densities through participation in those feedback loops.

A swarm design paradigm unifying swarm behaviors using minimalistic communication.

Numerous nature inspired algorithms have been suggested to enable robotic swarms, mobile sensor networks and other multi-agent systems to exhibit various self-organized behaviors. Swarm intelligence and swarm robotics research have been underway for a few decades and have produced many such algorithms based on natural self-organizing systems. While a large body of research exists for variations and modifications in swarm intelligence algorithms, there have been few attempts to unify the underlying agent level design of these widely varying behaviors.

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.

Robotic Sensing and Stimuli Provision for Guided Plant Growth.

Robot systems are actively researched for manipulation of natural plants, typically restricted to agricultural automation activities such as harvest, irrigation, and mechanical weed control. Extending this research, we introduce here a novel methodology to manipulate the directional growth of plants via their natural mechanisms for signaling and hormone distribution. An effective methodology of robotic stimuli provision can open up possibilities for new experimentation with later developmental phases in plants, or for new biotechnology applications such as shaping plants for green walls.

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.

Autonomously shaping natural climbing plants: a bio-hybrid approach.

Plant growth is a self-organized process incorporating distributed sensing, internal communication and morphology dynamics. We develop a distributed mechatronic system that autonomously interacts with natural climbing plants, steering their behaviours to grow user-defined shapes and patterns. Investigating this bio-hybrid system paves the way towards the development of living adaptive structures and grown building components.

From honeybees to robots and back: division of labour based on partitioning social inhibition.

In this paper, a distributed adaptive partitioning algorithm inspired by division of labor in honeybees is investigated for its applicability in a swarm of underwater robots in one hand and is qualitatively compared with the behavior of honeybee colonies on the other hand. The algorithm, partitioning social inhibition (PSI), is based on local interactions and uses a simple logic inspired from age-polyethism and task allocation in honeybee colonies. The algorithm is analyzed in simulation and is successfully applied here to partition a swarm of underwater robots into groups demonstrating its adaptivity to changes and applicability in real world systems.

Generation of diversity in a reaction-diffusion-based controller.

A controller of biological or artificial organism (e.g., in bio-inspired cellular robots) consists of a number of processes that drive its dynamics.

Algorithmic requirements for swarm intelligence in differently coupled collective systems.

Swarm systems are based on intermediate connectivity between individuals and dynamic neighborhoods. In natural swarms self-organizing principles bring their agents to that favorable level of connectivity. They serve as interesting sources of inspiration for control algorithms in swarm robotics on the one hand, and in modular robotics on the other hand.