Claire chatted to Isabella Fiorello from the University of Freiburg about plant-inspired robots made from living materials. Isabella …
[Music] robot talk is the podcast that sits down with robot enthusiasts from around the world and ask them the questions you always want it answered like is that a robot or a plant and how does that thing work [Music] hello everyone welcome to robot talk I’m your host Claire Asher and this week’s episode is exploring an exciting new area of research that is taking inspiration from Plants to create robots that are soft adaptable and biodegradable before we get started I’d like to remind you that you can send in questions for my future guests and there are a few different ways you can do that you can submit questions on the website at robot talk.org or on patreon at patreon.com slcl aser or you can contact me on social media at robot talkpod so with all that said let’s get on with this week’s interview I recently had a really interesting conversation with Isabella fiell from the University of fryberg about plant inspired robots made from living [Music] materials this week I’m chatting to Isabella fiell a researcher at the University of fryberg working on biologically inspired hybrid materials hi Isabella welcome to robot talk hi Claire so you lead the bioinspired plant hybrid materials group uh where you’re developing new materials for applications in Soft Robotics Precision Agriculture and space exploration so first of all can you explain what a plant hybrid material is so thank you so much for the question actually I start my group here just recently in fror where my group is working on these materials that are not only bio inspired but also bioh hybrid in the sense that this material not only Tak in IR Iration from living organism especially plants in my case but also embed parts of the plants itself in the materials for example I create some materials that have actuation properties thanks to the parts of the plants embedded in the material or for example these materials can have sensing properties respect to the parts that you embed in the material itself so actually we can create materials that have the morphology let’s say the biomechanics of plants and also can be like functionalized to do some specific task like for example moving over the soil like in my last paper um or for example like send some parameters and so on amazing I mean it’s yeah truly quite sci-fi I love it thank you so much how do you go about like embedding parts of a plant into I guess a synthetic material yeah actually in my last paper the one publish in advanced material I create these biohybrid robots which was inspired by aena sterilis which is the common wild o maybe you know it it’s very common you can find everywhere in the field in many different habitats and so my idea was to create artificially the head the capsule of the robots and this I did using different micromanufacturing technique but then I remove some parts from the natural fruits of the plants these parts are calleded owns and there are some parts that thanks to humidity can move uh in different environments so what I did was really to embed these parts in the synthetic materials and so then thanks to this Parts the robots can move on and into the soils because the owns of the natural plants itself can do it so actually the idea was to mimic really the behavior of the plants but also the morphology and the mechanics of the plants and then functionalize the head of the robots with for example in our case with some other seats okay for reforestation applications okay so yeah the it buries itself in the soil right yes exactly you have these robot that can uh move autonomously so don’t need any energy because the energy is embedded in the material itself and can be functionalized uh like I say with other seeds for example or fertilizer and so on and then can move inside for example the soil cracks or irregularities so the robots find autonomously this cracks and then it go inside that and it start to degrade to be us it to deliver something like for example fertilizer as I say or others that’s that’s amazing so yeah completely biodegradable automatic planting or fertilizing of the soil yes exactly it’s fully biodegradable I would say it’s also edible so it’s not affect the biodiversity let’s say because it’s made by a flow material the capsule is totally biodegradable and edible and the owns are taken from the natural plants so actually you don’t have any uh dangerous or toxic materials in the environment that’s really cool um so where do you get your inspiration from do you start with the problem or do you start from like observing the natural world and going oh this is a really cool property what can I do with that yes or a bit of both maybe the idea at the beginning was to create a new actuators inspired by this plans but then after looking at the plants which is this plant I told you AA sterilis which has two interactive sister ownes that actually interact each other they rotate interact and then accumulate elastic energy and then the robots release the energy and the robots can also move by jumping over the soil so this is the moment so what I would really do is to let me say really create a biohybrid system because this was the first hybrid system inspired also by by wild fruid and also the first system that really embed parts of the plant itself and these are dead tissue of the plants so it’s not a living tissue it’s not like you are removing don’t know for example a leaf or something and then the the leaf will of course die know because nutrients and so on but in this case because it’s a dead tissue also if you remove from the plants it’s remain with the properties with the proper functionalities and so I can use it as actuator for the robots and the inspiration I have just really looking at the at the fluids and uh at the beginning I was thinking to do these actuators but then really was too difficult to mimic and so I decided to also embed the part of the plant itself and plus was working so yeah fantastic decide to continue with this yeah I think I’ve spoken to a lot of people who do like bioinspired robotics but usually they are trying to you know copy a mechanism rather than actually embed the once living material into the into the robot itself yeah exactly that’s also the novelty know the of this work that we publish in advanced material yeah I think maybe a lot of listeners might not actually be aware like there’s an awful lot of plants that have different structures that kind of change in response to different conditions like I’m aware of like pine cones which open up to release their seeds and these these structures that sort of essentially sense the environment and then and then respond in somewhere quite quite amazing yeah actually what you say it’s uh perfectly correct because for example also the pine cones can be used for a similar applications actually here in fror there are a lot of peoples also working on this Pine con mechanism and it could be also cool to do a robots that Ed this part I mean because the the field is so new there are also so many applications that can be done in this direction so also my group we are working more on bio inspired of FS but also biohybrid system and for biohybrid I really mean in this moment to embed that issue of plants for example or also in the last period I’m working on some materials which are inspired by plants but that for example also embed some microalga inside okay this I did during my stay at the California Institute of Technology for five month and in this case this material can also for example self heal so like some selfing properties but as like the shape and the morphology of natural plants that’s really cool yeah I haven’t come across anyone else who’s really working in this area is it is it really kind of really new yeah it’s a really new area there are very few people in the world that I mean on this bio hybrid I think really it’s really a new field but there are some group that work on plant inspired structures of course my past supervisor Barbara matai she’s the pioneer of the plant inspired robotics because in ha lab they create for example the first robots inspired by the plant roots that can also grow inside the soil and be use it to monitor different parameters and yeah and now there are also other groups in the world that start working on this yeah I think most of the bioinspired robots I’ve seen before are usually inspired by animals yes yes yes exactly people don’t give plants enough credit for like being really smart and adaptable and responding and and moving and doing all kinds of things that we don’t kind of traditionally think of plants as doing yeah that’s true actually there are a lot of groups that work on animals for example there are robots inspired by the gofit or by the be by the octopus and so on uh but there are uh yeah very few group working on Plants but I will say in the last per there were also a lot of materials especially materials not really robots sometimes it’s just a material that is inspired by the micro structures especially of plants or the internal structure of the plants especially because plants are really important for the biomechanical properties because they they can’t move like animals so they can’t escape the environment in which they grow so they have to ADT to the environments and to do it they develop different biomechanical and morphological properties that can be really interesting for different application in robotics in architecture in space Explorer I mean there are many different application one one project of yours that caught my eye was a a tiny climbing robot um that’s inspired by the hooked leaves of plants um so can you tell us a bit about that yes sure actually this was my PhD project okay and um to do it I took inspiration from a plants which is called garina and this plants are some small micro oops over the leaf what I did was to take inspiration from the morphology and biomechanics of these microbes to create a materials a micro patterned materials which has the same shape of the micro HS of gum aerin and so I created these ades that were um use it for reversible attachment to many different surfaces like for example I tested to textile tissue or skin tissue or also to LIF tissue I actually have also a early career National Geographic Grant on this topic especially the micro oops on the leaf attachment and what we did in my past group was to embed also these micro with sensors to create a multiparameter sensor that can like attach over the upper and lower side of the leaf to monitor remotely different parameters or we did this tiny climbing robots actually we create this sort of mini car where we attach the micro HS and the robots with the micro HS was able to climb but different surface while the robots without was not able to do it that was very funny then I did also some other work connected to to that that’s really cool yeah so it’s kind of the plant version of velcro it’s a sort of velcro but there is a one main difference with velcro because with velcro you have first of all a micro hook that has a different shape and this shape I mean when you have a loop part and a hook part you need a force to detach the two parts yeah instead in my specific case I have um let me say a micro hook that is Direction based so actually you can just remove the micro hook just changing the direction of the applied low so this is very useful for example for application like climbing robots or for example for manipulation applications and also another big difference is that our micro can be used not only to textiles but also over Leaf surface for example and especially in the leaf surface I forgot to say that the microps can not only attach but can also be used to deliver molecules inside the plant vascular tissue right and actually we have also a patent on this technology because was the first technology that can really attach sense and also deliver molecules inside the plant vascular tissue yeah it sounds like there’s probably an lot of applications for that but do you have any specific ones in mind yeah actually I would love that in the future this technology can be used for yeah of course Precision agriculture so especially you can think to use this kind of device for example to treat some disease in plants for example there is Cella fastidiosa that is a very a very dangerous disease for plants and this is inside the FL and the celum of the plants and with the micro hooks you can directly access to the cilum and the FL of the plants and you could directly derive for example some bacter sides inside them to to fight with this kind of disease instead of spraying the pesticides over the cuticle of so for listeners who aren’t familiar the xylm and flum is kind of like the circulatory system of a plant for lack of a better way of explaining it yeah yeah so you’re you’re kind of injecting a medicine into the plant essentially yes exactly it’s like it’s a sort of let’s say micro needle device you know there are this device used especially for skin tissue but in our case we are developing a micro device that is instead to treat plants yeah so you can think to use this technology for something like this or for example also for research purpose if you need that tool to deliver something in a precise way inside the Lea surface yeah yeah so I I just love the idea of like a little robot wandering around the field and then like finding a plant that’s infected and kind of climbing up and injecting it with some medicine that’s that would be really cool yeah yeah at the moment we are a bit far from this but I mean we have some let’s say preliminary encouraging Publications sure yeah I I do tend to get ahead of myself with imagining where this this stuff could go we’ve talked quite a lot about applications in Precision agriculture um you also mentioned space exploration how do you see plant hybrid materials or or bioinspired materials being used in that kind of domain yeah that’s a very nice question actually I really love space applications is one of my main passion let’s say and I would love to apply the technology that I develop the one of the aen aets I mean the biohybrid robots that can move on and into the soil also in space simulants like for example Mars simulants or for example also lunar simulants because you can for example use this kind of robots to increase the fertility of the soil in space right like imagine you have this device that is autonomously moving over of course at the beginning will be a reconstructed space environment but you can like release these robots and these robots can move and plant itself in the soil and you know that we have a big problem of I mean we can’t plant anything in the soil in space at the moment so this can be a first um tool biohybrid tool inspired by plants that can be used to plant plants in space yeah like part of a kind of terraforming project I guess yes something like this yes yes like for a sort of reforestation in Bas scenario yeah when I hear about ideas about how we might colonize another planet obviously the common theme is that we send robots to kind of get things set up for us first yeah um but yeah they rarely talk about robots being able to plant forests for us so that would be cool yeah but is there soil on like Mars or the moon isn’t it just like Dusty yeah yeah I mean there actually I I have now because I bought from a startup so it’s possible to buy this Mars soil simulant so oh and uh I plan to test it in the future yeah I hope also to get some big grants on this so that I will have some people working on Space projects awesome yeah that’s that’s really cool um there any other projects you’d like to talk about yeah I mean the last period I’m working more on um aquatic plants so not only terrestrial plants okay and so I hope in the near future to have a publication on this because we are in the last phase at the moment and also my PhD students she just started eight months ago and we are working on also an aquatic robot so stay tuned at because yeah absolutely I mean this is it’s a really Noel fascinating area of research and I can see there being like just so many different areas you could apply this to so I’m very excited to hear about what you get up to in the future thank you so much Isabella it’s been really fun talking to you today I’ve been speaking to Isabella fiell from the University of fryberg thank you thank you so [Music] much thanks for listening if you enjoy robot talk please share the podcast subscribe and leave a review it really helps boost the podcast so thanks in advance and make sure you check out at robot talkpod on social media to see a photo of the miniature biohybrid robot that can bury itself in the soil which Isabella and I talked about I thought you might like to hear a sneak peek of this month’s bonus episode what is one thing about your field that you wish more people knew I think I would like people to know that robots are not only very complex robust and impressive systems but they are also a bit dumb they’re a bit dummies in a way because they require a lot of work to make them work you know you have to know exactly how to Wrangle them uh to make them work so I think that that’ be nice thing to communicate to people yeah absolutely yeah I think people assume when because they see that the robot is kind of autonomous and is doing some things on its own they kind of assume that it is like you know a cat or a dog and kind of can just look after itself and we’ll just be fine and and functional without any kind of input yeah scale drone operations is technically crazy hard we do more engineering that most people would never assume we do that that yeah it boggles people’s minds when they see it if you’d like to hear more from this bonus episode sign up as a supporter on patreon by going to patreon.com slcl aser and you’ll get access to the full catalog of bonus content next week I’m talking to keen and wbec from zipline about delivering Medicine by drone until then I’ve been Claire Asher and this has been robot talk robot talk is brought to you by the Hamlin Center Imperial College London [Music] oh
