The plant as a biomechatronic system

Abstract

Our vision of plants is changing dramatically: from insensitive and static objects to complex living beings able to sense the environment and to use the information collected to adapt their behaviour. At all times humans imitate ideas and concepts from nature to resolve technological problems. Solutions coming from plants have the potential to face challenges and difficulties of modern engineering design. Characteristic concepts of the plant world such as reiteration, modularity and swarm behaviour could be of great help resolving technological problems. On the other hand a biorobotic approach would facilitate the resolution of many biological problems. In this paper, the concept of a plant-inspired robot is proposed for the investigation of both biological and technological issues.