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About

Marc Thielen is a leading researcher at the intersection of biomechanics and soft robotics, drawing profound inspiration from the movement strategies of climbing plants. His work focuses on bio-inspired actuation, sensing, and control, demonstrating how plants—often perceived as immobile—offer elegant solutions for flexible, adaptive machines. Thielen’s major contributions include the development of artificial tendrils that mimic plant coiling through mismatched modulus and strain, and soft continuum robotic arms like “Mandy,” which replicate the adaptive searching and twining behaviors of searcher stems to achieve complex motions with minimal sensing and control effort. His highly cited works, such as the 2023 review “Plants as inspiration for material-based sensing and actuation in soft robots and machines” (31 citations) and the 2020 paper “Searching and Intertwining: Climbing Plants and GrowBots” (20 citations), have helped establish plant-inspired robotics as a vibrant research field. Thielen’s detailed biomechanical studies, including the morphology of passion flower tendrils as natural coil springs, reveal how biological structures can inform the design of soft, compliant robots for applications ranging from remote inspection to medical devices.