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

Design, Assembly, and Fabrication of Two-Dimensional Nanomaterials into Functional Biomimetic Device Systems

Diverse functioning biosystems in nature have inspired us and offered unique opportunities in developing novel concepts as well as new class of materials and devices. The design of bioinspired functional materials with tailored properties for actuation, sensing, electronics, and communication has enabled synthetic devices to mimic natural behavior. Among which, artificial muscle and electronic skin that enable to sense and respond to various environmental stimuli in a human-like way have been widely recognized as a significant step toward robotics applications. Polymer materials have previously been dominant in fabricating such functional biomimetic devices owing to their soft nature. However, lacking multifunctionality, handling difficulty, and other setbacks have limited their practical applications. Recently, versatile and high-performance two-dimensional (2D) materials such as graphene and its derivatives have been studied and proven as promising alternatives in this area. In this chapter, we highlight the recent efforts on fabrication and assembly of 2D nanomaterials into functional biomimetic systems. We discuss the structure-function relationships for the development of 2D materials–based biomimetic devices, their tailoring property features, and their variety of applications. We start with a brief introduction of artificial functional biomimetic materials and devices, then summarize some key 2D materials–based systems, including their fabrication, properties, advantages and demonstrations, and finally present concluding remarks and outlook