Robotic Plants!
EU researchers are demonstrating revolutionary robotic techniques inspired by plants, featuring a 3D-printed 'trunk', 'leaves' that sense the environment and 'roots' that grow and change direction. The robotic plant even has the ability to fashion new material and implant them onto the tip of the root! It's a growing robot!
Humans naturally understand problems and solutions from an animal's perspective, tending to see plants as passive organisms that don't 'do' much of anything, but plants do move, and they sense, and they do so in extremely efficient ways.
Barbara Mazzolai of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) coordinates the FP7 - PLANTOID project says, "humans can learn a lot from plants. Our aim is to design, prototype and validate a new generation of ICT hardware and software technologies inspired by plants."
The plant robotic has innumerous applications: detection of pollutant concentrations in soil, space exploration via planting itself into alien worlds while adapting to harsh external conditions, medical field use of endoscopic scaled plant robots for surgical procedures, search and rescue for large scale applications, smarter devices with not only the ability to sense, but also to follow stimuli and take decisions.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-10-robotic-solutions.html#jCp
EU researchers are demonstrating revolutionary robotic techniques inspired by plants, featuring a 3D-printed 'trunk', 'leaves' that sense the environment and 'roots' that grow and change direction. The robotic plant even has the ability to fashion new material and implant them onto the tip of the root! It's a growing robot!
Humans naturally understand problems and solutions from an animal's perspective, tending to see plants as passive organisms that don't 'do' much of anything, but plants do move, and they sense, and they do so in extremely efficient ways.
Barbara Mazzolai of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) coordinates the FP7 - PLANTOID project says, "humans can learn a lot from plants. Our aim is to design, prototype and validate a new generation of ICT hardware and software technologies inspired by plants."
The plant robotic has innumerous applications: detection of pollutant concentrations in soil, space exploration via planting itself into alien worlds while adapting to harsh external conditions, medical field use of endoscopic scaled plant robots for surgical procedures, search and rescue for large scale applications, smarter devices with not only the ability to sense, but also to follow stimuli and take decisions.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-10-robotic-solutions.html#jCp