EU Project Developing Symbiotic Robot-Plant Biohybrids

Flora Robotica is a project funded by the European Union whose goal is "to develop and investigate closely linked symbiotic relationships between robots and natural plants and to explore the potentials of a plant-robot society able to produce architectural artifacts and living spaces." The overall idea seems to be that it would be cool to enhance the capabilities of plants by mixing in some robotics, and vice versa, combining plant growth with the structure and mobility of robots. The researcheres, from six research groups based in Poland, Denmark, Germany, and Austria, emphasize that their motivation is not automating gardening or harvesting using robots, which is something a number of robotics companies has focused on before; they aren't creating plant-robot hybrids for artistic purposes either (we've seen that in installations like the Telegarden, built in 1995, and, more recently, the Jurema Action Plant, among others). What the European researchers want to do is basically using robots to provide support and guidance to plants, so those plants will be healthier and more robust, and they'll also be somewhat trainable: They'll react to the stimuli coming from the robots, allowing you to incorporate them into living, hybrid structures like benches, walls, and roofs. The robots are implemented as hardware modules that allow to implement an artificial growth process and to keep pace with the natural growth of the plants.