Editorial: Generation Growbots: Materials, Mechanisms, and Biomimetic Design for Growing Robots

Abstract

Plants are the dominant life form on the planet, accounting for over 80% of its biomass Plants are adapted to and thrive in virtually all environments, both natural and human-adapted, across the globe. In achieving this widespread presence, plants exhibit a significant range of structures and operational strategies. On the one hand, many key aspects of plant biology remain imperfectly understood, and the possibilities for plant-inspired engineering remain largely unexplored. On the other hand, increasing interest in plant-inspired research can be observed in architecture and technology in general over the last decades (cf. Speck and Speck 2019). More recently, plants have also started to represent models in robotics With this view, the goal of this special issue is to illustrate the potential of identifying principles from plant growth and movement suitable for engineering, and the adaptation of those principles to the new emerging field of "growing" robots, or Growbots.