IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2016 - 114

WOMEN IN ENGINEERING

Biology for Robotics-A Multidisciplinary
Approach to a Researcher's Life
By Barbara Mazzolai

I

never thought that my passion
would one day become my job.
Since childhood, I had a great interest in looking at nature and observing creatures' behavior for hours. I was
attracted by their shapes, colors, and
interaction capabilities. My current
research interest is bioinspired robotics, and my personal aim in working
in this area is to better understand
nature and the performance of living
creatures-ranging from single cells to
entire plants and animals-to conceptualize, design, and fabricate new artificial devices and bioinspired robots.
My background is in marine biology,
but I have been working in robotics
for more than ten years, so my
research interest and my professional
training represent a merger between
biology and engineering.
It is really fascinating to me how
many lessons we can take from living
systems and their functions to make
innovations in the artificial world. On
the other hand, a bioinspired approach
also helps to increase the knowledge of
the biological systems that we use as
models. I like to think that bioinspired
robots will increasingly become scientific tools in the hands of biologists
and researchers, validating hypotheses
and theories on living systems by
using devices that operate in the same
environments and are affected by
analogous physical constrains.
The identification of creatures to
study and then translate into artificial
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2015.2511687
Date of publication: 8 March 2016

114

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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devices has been driven by two main
factors: my knowledge and passion for
a specific living system and the potential application of the artificial counterpart for improving human wellness
and quality of life, with an eye toward
industrial exploitation.
Recently, I started studying the
anatomy, physiology, and behavior of
plants and, in particular, the plant root
apparatus, to design and develop new
information and communications
technology and robotic solutions.
Despite their exceptional evolutionary
and ecological success, plants have
rarely been considered as a source of
inspiration for robotics and artificial
intelligence, probably because of misconceptions about their capabilities
and because of their radically different
operating principles compared with
animals. The study of soil-penetration
strategies in plant roots allows us to 1)
better understand how roots can efficiently move in their harsh environment and 2) translate solutions in the
artificial world. To give an idea of the
perspective on the engineering side,
our goal is to develop new soft plantinspired robots able to grow by adding
new materials. This requires the development of new actuation solutions for
steering and elongation of the robotic
root, sensing, control and robotic
architectures (distributed control,
coordination of many degrees of freedom), and kinematics models.
Another important question that I
address concerns whether plants
exhibit intelligent behavior. In animals,
behavior usually refers to movements

march 2016

generated by muscles; plant intelligence
on that basis does not exist. Movement
is, however, the expression of intelligence; it is not intelligence itself [1], [2].
Nonetheless, plants respond to internal
and external signals. Thus, a simple
definition of plant intelligence could be
adaptively variable growth and development during the lifetime of the individual. Exploiting adaptive abilities in
plants could lead to the development of
smart devices to monitor soil-not
solely with the ability to sense but with
the capability to follow stimuli/gradients and to take decisions to accomplish the needed tasks. Applications for
technologies inspired by plants include
soil monitoring, penetration, and
exploration on Earth and in extraterrestrial environments but could also
include medical and surgical applications. For example, new flexible endoscopes, able to steer and grow, could be
envisioned for safer operation in delicate structures, such as the central nervous system.
Facing these scientific and technological challenges has been made
possible by the creation of a multidisciplinary group that works with me on
these fascinating topics and includes
engineers, biologists, material and
computer scientists, and chemists. The
collaboration of these young scientists
and researchers, so different in terms
of their previous experiences and
skills, strongly contributes to create a
stimulating and dynamic working atmosphere in which people try to understand the same problem from
different views and with different tools,



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2016

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