A plant-inspired robot with soft differential bending capabilities

Abstract

We present the design and development of a plant-inspired robot, named Plantoid, with sensorized robotic roots. Natural roots have a multi-sensing capability and show a soft bending behaviour to follow or escape from various environmental parameters (i.e., tropisms). Analogously, we implement soft bending capabilities in our robotic roots by designing and integrating soft spring-based actuation (SSBA) systems using helical springs to transmit the motor power in a compliant manner. Each robotic tip integrates four different sensors, including customised flexible touch and innovative humidity sensors together with commercial gravity and temperature sensors. We show how the embedded sensing capabilities together with a root-inspired control algorithm lead to the implementation of tropic behaviours. Future applications for such plant-inspired technologies include soil monitoring and exploration, useful for agriculture and environmental fields.

Swarming Behavior Emerging from the Uptake–Kinetics Feedback Control in a Plant-Root-Inspired Robot

“…Root-inspired behavior was implemented first in a simulation and then in a robotic platform called Plantoid, which is a plant-inspired robot with a root apparatus where the robotic roots mimic the bending movements of plant roots thanks to the actuation of three soft springs that can elongate differentially [26]. Each root is endowed with perception capabilities by embedding an accelerometer, to detect gravity, three commercial temperature sensors, placed at 120 • from each other, and customized humidity and tactile sensors (for details on the design and sensors, see [26]).…”

“…Each root is endowed with perception capabilities by embedding an accelerometer, to detect gravity, three commercial temperature sensors, placed at 120 • from each other, and customized humidity and tactile sensors (for details on the design and sensors, see [26]). …”

“…It has also opened the door to a relatively new discipline, called swarm robotics, which applies swarm intelligence basis of local information and perception. With respect to our previous plant-inspired control [26], in this paper, we introduce local memory, inter-agent communication and the dynamic evolution of nutrient priorities.…”

“…These features are then implemented as a control strategy for a robotic platform, the Plantoid [26], which mimics the key movements of plant roots, i.e., directional bending of the apical part of the root. The robotic system and the simulated environment used for validation are briefly introduced in Section 2.3, followed by a detailed presentation of the implemented control (Section 2.4) and the experiments performed to validate the hypothesis (Section 2.5).…”

Evolutionary Developmental Soft Robotics As a Framework to Study Intelligence and Adaptive Behavior in Animals and Plants

“…Researchers in biologically inspired robotics (Pfeifer et al, 2007) have typically looked for answers in biology, studying animals (Cacucciolo et al, 2014;Calisti et al, 2014Calisti et al, , 2015Ijspeert, 2014) and, more recently, plants (Pandolfi and Izzo, 2013;Hamann et al, 2015;Temirel et al, 2016;Sadeghi et al, 2017), with the aim of extracting general principles underlying the evolutionary success of these creatures, then applying these insights to the development of more effective and efficient robotic systems (Corucci et al, 2015a,b;Giorgio-Serchi et al, 2017). One product of this intellectual procedure is the soft robotics field (Rus and Tolley, 2015;Laschi et al, 2016), arising from the realization that the material characteristics of the body-and softness in particular-play a crucial role in the robust and adaptive behavior of biological and artificial creatures (Pfeifer et al, 2013).…”