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

From waste to kwaste: on the Blue Economy in terms of knowledge flow

International audienceIntroduced by Gunter Pauli, the Blue Economy, namely bio-inspired industrial ecology or self-profitable circular economy, is a remarkable example of the way the knowledge flow can fundamentally alter micro, meso and macroeconomics , and be converted into cash flow. Its reception is also a case of limited rationality in management and economics, and of resistance to change in general. Here I simplify the Blue Economy to the following equation: waste + knowledge = asset. I then explore the implications of this equation in terms of venture capitalism (microeconomics) accounting (micro-mesoeconomics) and in terms of GDP (macroeconomics). I finally discuss its possible impact on po-litico-economic decision-making and its clear continuity with the knowledge economy. One fertile question thus arises: what could be the micro-meso-macroeconomic stygmergies of the Blue Economy