Periodic Reporting for period 3 - flora robotica (Flora Robotica: Societies of Symbiotic Robot-Plant Bio-Hybrids as Social Architectural Artifacts)
Período documentado: 2018-04-01 hasta 2019-03-31
The world’s population is growing and a majority of people live in cities. We are losing contact to nature and don’t realize our fundamental dependency on natural plants for nutrition and oxygen. We should grow food on our houses and use plants to cool our buildings. flora robotica has developed fundamental tools to automatically grow plants into desired patterns, to keep certain spaces free of plants, and to steer the growth.
Objective 1 - Agency in mixed societies. We have worked to understand synergistic biological and technical systems. We have investigated a hybrid system consisting of plants, robots, and human beings that form synergistic relationships during a long-term developmental growth process. The plants and robots form a hybrid system and cooperate by sharing perceptions and by mutually providing support in decision-making.
Objective 2 - Smart artifacts. We have created smart architectural infrastructure as a cognitive being. The plant-robot system is applied as an autonomous, interactive developmental and cognitive system to create adapting architectural artifacts (walls, roofs) of various uses (sound-insulating, shading). We have created an adaptive growth process by exploiting different tropisms of the plants (phototropism, thigmotropism) along and against them. The perceptions of plants and robots are leveraged to adapt to interactions and behavioral patterns of human beings that are co-inhabitants of the same green infrastructure (offices, gardens).
Objective 3 - Structures as memory. Both plants and robots show self-organized growth with an embodied memory that integrates perceptions over time in shapes. The plant-robot system flora robotica forms a bio-hybrid ecology that we have investigated in terms of developmental plasticity and long-term controllability. We have applied decentralized/bio-inspired control, methods from swarm intelligence and from evolutionary robotics to implement a self-organizing, resilient adaptive system.
We have developed passive and active braided structures that serve as scaffold during the long-term developmental process. The braided scaffolds allow plants to grow through them, into them, along them and hence nicely implement the synergistic concept of this mixed society. We let plants interact with braided scaffolds that offer mechanical stimuli and trigger reactions by the plant, and have embedded electronics into material tests of braided scaffolds. We have investigated self-organized construction of braided scaffolds with mobile robots, in which the organizational structure of the filaments serves as an interpretable embodied memory of the robots' past behaviors.
The plant-interaction mechanisms and the plant sensors, so-called phyto-sensors, that are investigated in flora robotica, have a considerable impact as they can be used in two ways. On the one hand, using them as standard sensors they give us knowledge about plant parameters. On the other hand, we can use the plant as a sensor for different external stimuli by using the phyto-sensors as interface to receive plant responses. We expect the emergence of a novel class of approaches to plant-treatment. In developing phyto-hybrid design, flora robotica representational methods have impacted the architectural community with a novel approach to the design and growth of artifacts involving self-organization by guaranteeing key attributes rather than specifying exhaustive descriptions of fine-scale details.
Besides the usual engineering objectives of maximizing functionality, performance and robustness, flora robotica offers architectural artifacts that combine functionality with sustainable organic growth and symbiotic sharing of functionality between plants and mechatronic technology.
The impact of flora robotica to plant science is due to the creation of new perspectives for plant biology. In flora robotica we focus on the regulation of plant growth in a different way than in foregoing agricultural or gardening practice. Actions of modular robots allow us to experiment with many localized stimulations of plants, which then influence the plant growth. An insight from this kind of plant stimulation is that the emerging interplay between local events and global effects in the organism’s development are of more importance than expected. Also new research perspectives appear in the reciprocal interactions and communication between plants and robots that require further investigation of mechanisms of plant-plant interactions, plant-animal interactions, and plant-environment interactions.
The long-term impact of flora robotica will be on how we grow plants in cities, in outdoor and indoor gardens, and on farmland. With automatic systems that grow plants in appropriate shapes and patterns, we will see more green infrastructure in our future megacities. Plants will help to cool our cities and in combination with practices of urban gardening and vertical gardening we will grow some of our food in immediate proximity to where it is consumed.