Flora robotica -- An Architectural System Combining Living Natural Plants and Distributed Robots

Key to our project flora robotica is the idea of creating a bio-hybrid system of tightly coupled natural plants and distributed robots to grow architectural artifacts and spaces. Our motivation with this ground research project is to lay a principled foundation towards the design and implementation of living architectural systems that provide functionalities beyond those of orthodox building practice, such as self-repair, material accumulation and self-organization. Plants and robots work together to create a living organism that is inhabited by human beings. User-defined design objectives help to steer the directional growth of the plants, but also the system's interactions with its inhabitants determine locations where growth is prohibited or desired (e.g., partitions, windows, occupiable space). We report our plant species selection process and aspects of living architecture. A leitmotif of our project is the rich concept of braiding: braids are produced by robots from continuous material and serve as both scaffolds and initial architectural artifacts before plants take over and grow the desired architecture. We use light and hormones as attraction stimuli and far-red light as repelling stimulus to influence the plants. Applied sensors range from simple proximity sensing to detect the presence of plants to sophisticated sensing technology, such as electrophysiology and measurements of sap flow. We conclude by discussing our anticipated final demonstrator that integrates key features of flora robotica, such as the continuous growth process of architectural artifacts and self-repair of living architecture.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figure

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

A mixed-autonomous robotic platform for intra-row and inter-row weed removal for precision agriculture

The presence of weeds poses a common and persistent problem in crop cultivation, affecting both yield and overall agricultural productivity. Common solutions to the problem typically include chemical pesticides, mulching, or mechanical weeding performed by agricultural implements or humans. Even if effective, those techniques have several drawbacks, including soil and water pollution, high cost-effectiveness ratio or stress for operators. In recent years, novel robotic solutions have been proposed to overcome current limitations and to move towards more sustainable approaches to weeding. This work presents a mixed-autonomous, robotic, weeding system based on a fully integrated three-axis platform and a vision system mounted on a mobile rover. The rover’s motion is remotely controlled by a human operator, while weeds identification and removal is performed autonomously by the robotic system. Once in position, an RGB-D camera captures the portion of field to be treated. The acquired spatial, color and depth information is used to classify soil, the main crop, and the weeds to be removed using a pre-trained Deep Neural Network. Each target is then analyzed by a second RGB-D camera (mounted on the gripper) to confirm the correct classification before its removal. With the proposed approach, weeds are all the plants not classified as the main crop known a priori. The performance of the integrated robotic system has been tested in laboratory as well as in open field and in greenhouse conditions. The system was also tested under different light and shadowing conditions to evaluate the performance of the Deep Neural Network. Results show that the identification of the plants (both crop and weeds) is above 95%, increasing to 98% when additional information, such as the intra-row spacing, is provided. Nevertheless, the correct identification of the weeds remains above 97% ensuring an effective removal of weeds (up to 85%) with negligible crop damage (less than 5%)

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

Bio-inspired programmable matter for space applications

Nowadays, space structures are often designed to serve only a single objective during their mission life, examples are solar sails for propulsion, antennas for communication or shields for protection. By enabling a structure to change its shape and therefore adapt to different mission stages in a single structure, the flexibility of the spacecraft can be increased by greatly decreasing the mass of the entire system. The possibility to obtain such a structure lies in a cellular approach in which every cell is programmable to change its basic properties. The shape change of the global structure can be significantly by adding up these local changes, for example the cells length. An idea presented in this paper is to adapt these basic changeable elements from nature’s heliotropism. Heliotropism is the growth or movement of an organism towards the direction of the sunlight. By changing the turgor pressure between two adjacent cells in the plant’s stem, called motor cells, the stem of the plant flexes. Due to the simplicity of the principle, the movement through pressure change seems perfect for the application on deployable space structures. The design of the adaptive membrane consists of an array of cells which are inflated by employing residual air inflation. Residual air inflation uses the expansion of trapped air inside the structure when subjected to vacuum conditions to inflate the structure. A high packing efficiency and deployment reliability can be achieved by using this passive deployment technique coupled with a multiple unit membrane design. To imitate the turgor pressure change between the motor cells of the plants to space structures, piezoelectric micro pumps are added between two neighbouring cells. The smallest actuator unit in this assembly is therefore the two neighbouring cells and the connected micro pump. The cellular and multiple unit approach makes the structure highly scalable with countless application areas. This paper will outline the design idea and fabrication of the bio-inspired membrane and its application to space missions. Deployment simulations were undertaken in LS-DYNA™ and compared to bench test samples of vacuum inflating circular specimens. A model to control the local elements in order to obtain a desired global shape will be presented as well. The paper will conclude with an overview on the REXUS 13 sounding rocket experiment StrathSat-R which will deploy a prototype of the bio-inspired adaptive membrane in micro gravity in spring 2013