Bioinspired Soft Robotics for Sustainability

The advancement of technology has a profound and far-reaching impact on society, currently penetrating all areas of life. This advance, however, often negatively affects our ecosystems, with growing demands on energy, contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, and environmental pollution. Mitigating these adverse effects is among the grand challenges of our times and provides a strong motivation to push the research frontier on materials and robotics. A new wave of eco-friendly robots is envisioned by merging bioinspired soft robotics, material science, nanocomposite technologies, and environmental science.

Taking inspiration from natural systems can provide new insights for designing the next generation robots and rethinking robot bodies, control, and interactions with humans/world over their entire life (i.e., a robotics life cycle). These “green robots” will operate in unstructured environments for environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, reforestation, biodiversity protection, and remediation.

With this vision in mind, this talk will present some of our results on plant- and soft animal-inspired robots with high morphological adaptability, distributed sensory systems, as well as energy-saving mechanisms, which are able to operate in natural habitats while minimizing waste and reducing their environmental footprint.