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Your new Strategy Toolkit newsletter (June 24, 2024)

(1) Plant-based design strategies

The majority of inspiration in robotics design has come from human behaviour (anthromorphic) or other machines (vehicular). Only lately have we turned to the natural world for ideas, in particular animals like the octopus, with classic biomimicry strategies. Now, scientists are reaching out to the world of plants for new innovations, like “Filobot”.

“The field of robotics has proved far less keen to investigate the other major category of living things—plants. (Barbara Mazzolai, an Italian roboticist) attributes the reluctance to a misconception about the usefulness of plant behaviour: that they are capable of neither motion nor perception. “It’s not true at all,” she says.

“Dr Mazzolai and her team at the Bioinspired Soft Robotics Laboratory at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa recently unveiled a machine meant to uproot this dogma. Writing in Science Robotics,* they described “FiloBot”, a robot based on climbing plants. Like the real thing, FiloBot (from the Italian word for “tendril”) is capable of growing, attaching to and twining around supports, and navigating through an environment in response to external stimuli.”**

* Emanuela Del Dottore et al., A growing soft robot with climbing plant–inspired adaptive behaviors for navigation in unstructured environments.Sci. Robot.9, eadi5908(2024).DOI:10.1126/scirobotics.adi5908

** Anonymous, “Putting the bot in botany,” The Economist (April 6 2024): 65-6; https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/04/03/why-robots-should-take-more-inspiration-from-plants