SMA bio-robotic mimesis of tendril-based climbing plants: First results

Abstract

Bio-inspired robots often “come” from the animal world while the plant world has not yet been deeply observed and considered. In this work we addressed a special class of climbing plants, that has evolved to gain height while minimizing the energy expenditure, as a new bio-robotic template: the tendril-bearer plants. These are able to grasp and coil around a support and, after that, push the stem towards the grasped element by recovering a spring-like shape from a wire condition. After the biological analysis, the idea of replicating the grasping by coiling and the pushing by shortening has been focused and replicated by Shape Memory Alloy-based proof of concept prototypes. The results show the feasibility of the approach.