Flora Robotica – Mixed Societies of Symbiotic Robot-Plant Bio-Hybrids

Besides the life-as-it-could-be driver of artificial life research there is also the concept of extending natural life by creating hybrids or mixed societies that are built from both natural and artificial components. In this paper, we motivate and present the research program of the project flora robotica. We present our concepts of control, hardware de-sign, modeling, and human interaction along with preliminary experiments. Our objective is to develop and to investigate closely linked symbiotic relationships between robots and natural plants and to explore the potentials of a plant-robot society able to produce archi-tectural artifacts and living spaces. These robot-plant bio-hybrids create synergies that allow for new functions of plants and robots. They also create novel design opportunities for an architecture that fuses the design and construction phase. The bio-hybrid is an example of mixed societies between ‘hard artificial and ‘wet natural life, which enables an interaction between natural and artificial ecologies. They form an embodied, self-organizing, and distributed cognitive system which is supposed to grow and develop over long periods of time resulting in the creation of meaningful architectural structures. A key idea is to assign equal roles to robots and plants in order to create a highly integrated, symbiotic system. Besides the gain of knowledge, this project has the objective to cre-ate a bio-hybrid system with a defined function and application – growing architectural artifacts

Constructing living buildings: a review of relevant technologies for a novel application of biohybrid robotics

Biohybrid robotics takes an engineering approach to the expansion and exploitation of biological behaviours for application to automated tasks. Here, we identify the construction of living buildings and infrastructure as a high-potential application domain for biohybrid robotics, and review technological advances relevant to its future development. Construction, civil infrastructure maintenance and building occupancy in the last decades have comprised a major portion of economic production, energy consumption and carbon emissions. Integrating biological organisms into automated construction tasks and permanent building components therefore has high potential for impact. Live materials can provide several advantages over standard synthetic construction materials, including self-repair of damage, increase rather than degradation of structural performance over time, resilience to corrosive environments, support of biodiversity, and mitigation of urban heat islands. Here, we review relevant technologies, which are currently disparate. They span robotics, self-organizing systems, artificial life, construction automation, structural engineering, architecture, bioengineering, biomaterials, and molecular and cellular biology. In these disciplines, developments relevant to biohybrid construction and living buildings are in the early stages, and typically are not exchanged between disciplines. We, therefore, consider this review useful to the future development of biohybrid engineering for this highly interdisciplinary application.publishe

Identifying the Evolutionary Conditions for the Emergence of Alternative Reproductive Tactics in Simulated Robot Colonies

Alternative reproductive tactics (ARTs), phenomena in which individuals within one sex adopt different tactics for accessing mates or raising offspring, are commonly observed in all major taxa. In order to study the ecological conditions for the emergence of ARTs, we developed an embodied evolution framework incorporating ecological features, such as body size and energy maintenance, where male and female robotic agents naturally face both intersexual and intrasexual interactions for survival and reproduction. Each agent has a decision neural network with extrinsic and intrinsic sensory inputs to choose one of four basic behaviors: mating, foraging, approaching and waiting. The reproductive success depends on the body size and the energy level of both male and female upon mating and it is assumed that only female carries the reproduction cost, as in nature the cost of male’s sperm production is negligible relative to that of female’s eggs. We performed simulation experiments in environments with different conditions (food density, reproductive cost, and male-female ratio) and found ARTs emerged both in males and females. Males evolved three kinds of alternative tactics - fixed genetically distinct ARTs (dominant and sneaker males that differ in body size and the tactic for getting access to female), conditionally flexible ARTs (individuals change tactics according to body size), and mixed ARTs (combination of genetically fixed and conditionally flexible ARTs). Females evolved to have two genetically distinct ARTs (quality oriented female, QoF, and number oriented female, NoF), where they increase fitness either by offspring quality or quantity. Analysis of the results confirms the experimental notions that male genetically fixed ARTs are strongly affected by intensity of sexual selection, male conditionally flexible ARTs are significantly affected by competition level, and female ARTs are mainly affected by food density. Analysis of ESS shows male ARTs are evolutionary stable with negative frequency dependent selection and female ARTs are evolutionary stable with both frequency and density dependent selection. To our knowledge, this study is the first to show the emergence of ARTs in both male and female from initially continuous characteristics in a simulated embodied evolution framework. The evolved ARTs are quite similar to the ARTs found in nature and provide insights about how interactions between the sexes are affected by and affect the evolution of ARTs within each sex. This framework is flexible enough to further analyze species of different sexual mechanisms (hermaphrodite, androdioecious, gynodioecious, etc.) and can be used as an important tool to understand the ecology of social interaction.Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate Universit

Perception in real and artificial insects: a robotic investigation of cricket phonotaxis

The aim of this thesis is to investigate a methodology for studying percep¬ tual systems by building artificial ones. It is proposed that useful results can be obtained from detailed robotic modelling of specific sensorimotor mechanisms in lower animals. By looking at the sensory control of behaviour in simple biological organisms, and in working robots, it is argued that proper appreciation of the physical interaction of the system with the environment and the task is essential for discovering how perceptual mechanisms function. Although links to biology, and concern with perceptual competence, are fields of growing interest in Artificial Intelligence, much of the current research fails to adequately address these issues, as the model systems being built do not represent real sensorimotor problems.By analyzing what is required for a model of a system to contribute to ex¬ plaining that system, a particular approach to modeling perceptual systems is suggested. This involves choosing an appropriate target system to model, building a system that validly represents the target with respect to a particular hypothesis, and properly evaluating the behaviour of the model system to draw conclusions about the target. The viability and potential contribution of this approach is demonstrated in the design, implementation and evaluation of a mobile robot model of a hypothesised mechanism for phonotaxis in the cricket.The result is a robot that successfully locates a specific sound source under a variety of conditions, with a range of behaviour that resembles the cricket in many ways. This provides some support for the hypothesis that the neural mechanism for phonotaxis in crickets does not involve separate processing for recognition and location of the signal, as is generally supposed. It also shows the importance of un¬ derstanding the physical interaction of the system's structure with its environment in devising and implementing perceptual systems. Both these results vindicate the proposed methodology

Estimating the effect of tracking tag weight on insect movement using video analysis: A case study with a flightless orthopteran

In this study, we describe an inexpensive and rapid method of using video analysis and identity tracking to measure the effects of tag weight on insect movement. In a laboratory experiment, we assessed the tag weight and associated context-dependent effects on movement, choosing temperature as a factor known to affect insect movement and behavior. We recorded the movements of groups of flightless adult crickets Gryllus locorojo (Orthoptera:Gryllidae) as affected by no tag (control); by light, medium, or heavy tags (198.7, 549.2, and 758.6 mg, respectively); and by low, intermediate, or high temperatures (19.5, 24.0, and 28.3 degrees C, respectively). Each individual in each group was weighed before recording and was recorded for 3 consecutive days. The mean (+/- SD) tag mass expressed as a percentage of body mass before the first recording was 26.8 +/- 3.7% with light tags, 72 +/- 11.2% with medium tags, and 101.9 +/- 13.5% with heavy tags. We found that the influence of tag weight strongly depended on temperature, and that the negative effects on movement generally increased with tag weight. At the low temperature, nearly all movement properties were negatively influenced. At the intermediate and high temperatures, the light and medium tags did not affect any of the movement properties. The continuous 3-day tag load reduced the average movement speed only for crickets with heavy tags. Based on our results, we recommend that researchers consider or investigate the possible effects of tags before conducting any experiment with tags in order to avoid obtaining biased results.Web of Science167art. no. e025511