During the first two years of the project, research activities focused on an in-depth investigation of climbing plants, including their anatomy, morphology, biomechanics, growth, movement, and behaviour. Concurrently, the consortium partners engaged in continuous collaboration across various fields of expertise to design and develop materials, actuators, anchoring systems, and growth solutions based on biological insights.
The third year emphasized the integration phase of different components into the GrowBots robotic platforms. All partners contributed to this integration phase using an interdisciplinary approach, resulting in mutual benefits for biology and engineering. Two robotic platforms were developed, incorporating mechanisms, materials, and control systems inspired by climbing plants, with potential applications in exploratory operations. A third platform focused on energy harvesting, incorporating plant-inspired triboelectric-based systems with micro-biofuel cells. This platform offers a novel energy harvesting system that can power artificial devices, such as humidity and temperature sensors or LEDs.
Additionally, technological prototypes implementing specific abilities of climbing plants, such as adhesion and coiling, were developed as stand-alone technologies. In the third and fourth years, the project entered the experimental validation phase. For biological validation, a list of potential functionalities was prepared, and specific comparative experiments were selected to test new functionalities inspired by climbing plant models in technical artifacts. For application-oriented validation, GrowBots were tested in simulated laboratory scenarios to verify their capabilities for movement and exploration in highly unstructured environments, performing various tasks.
Five application scenarios were formulated, and a total of eight technologies developed during the project were validated for these selected applications. Specifically, GrowBots target the following areas:
- Precision agriculture, utilizing micro-hooked functional surfaces and green energy harvesting technologies.
- Predictive modeling for biology, incorporating models developed for plant growth dynamics.
- Robotics for biology, where several technologies are applicable, with a focus on additive manufacturing-based growing robots.
- Biomedical applications, using tendril-inspired shape-memory fibers.
- Operations in unstructured environments, where multiple technologies can be applied, with a particular emphasis on searcher-like soft robots.
Since the inception of the project, the consortium has been dedicated to promoting the GrowBot vision within related scientific communities. Scientific events, including workshops, special sessions, and science cafés, as well as editorial initiatives, have been periodically organized across the fields of biology, material science, robotics, and geomechanics.
