A Reinforcement Learning approach to study climbing plant behaviour.

A plant's structure is the result of constant adaptation and evolution to the surrounding environment. From this perspective, our goal is to investigate the mass and radius distribution of a particular plant organ, namely the searcher shoot, by providing a Reinforcement Learning (RL) environment, that we call Searcher-Shoot, which considers the mechanics due to the mass of the shoot and leaves. We uphold the hypothesis that plants maximize their length, avoiding a maximal stress threshold.

A 2D model to study how secondary growth affects the self-supporting behaviour of climbing plants.

Climbing plants exhibit specialized shoots, called "searchers", to cross spaces and alternate between spatially discontinuous supports in their natural habitats. To achieve this task, searcher shoots combine both primary and secondary growth processes of their stems in order to support, orientate and explore their extensional growth into the environment. Currently, there is an increasing interest in developing models to describe plant growth and posture.

A General 3D Model for Growth Dynamics of Sensory-Growth Systems: From Plants to Robotics.

In recent years, there has been a rise in interest in the development of self-growing robotics inspired by the moving-by-growing paradigm of plants. In particular, climbing plants capitalize on their slender structures to successfully negotiate unstructured environments while employing a combination of two classes of growth-driven movements: tropic responses, growing toward or away from an external stimulus, and inherent nastic movements, such as periodic circumnutations, which promote exploration. In order to emulate these complex growth dynamics in a 3D environment, a general and rigorous mathematical framework is required.

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.

A comparison of two mathematical models of the cerebrospinal fluid dynamics.

In this paper we provide the numerical simulations of two cerebrospinal fluid dynamics models by comparing our results with the real data available in literature (see Section 4). The models describe different processes in the cerebrospinal fluid dynamics: the cerebrospinal flow in the ventricles of the brain and the reabsorption of the fluid. In the appendix we show in detail the mathematical analysis of both models and we identify the set of initial conditions for which the solutions of the systems of equations do not exhibit blow up.