NSF Award
2506466
This award supports fundamental research to create plant-inspired robots for long-duration monitoring missions in congested and dynamically evolving environments. Such environments abound in our world, for example, urban shopping districts, tropical forests, underwater reefs, and undeveloped islands. These locations are typically inaccessible and resource-limited for human operations, and they evolve slowly but substantially over time (e.g., propagating vegetation). However, “being right there” in these environments and responding to events at multiple time scales is critical, especially for environmental protection. Therefore, in this project plant-inspired robots will be designed to monitor and react to long-term processes like pollution spread, humidity levels, and seasonal migration of animal groups, as well as randomly occurring real-time events like pollution outbreaks, forest fires, and sightings of rare animals. To this end, the research team will abstract different capacities of plants—their distributed movements from slow to ballistic speed, adaptation according to ambient conditions, and energy harvesting processes—to establish new approaches toward robotic structure, motion, and functionality. On the education and outreach front, the award will support curriculum development in bio-inspired robotics, participation of undergraduate students in research, and outreach activities for middle school girls.<br/><br/>The objective of this research is to enable development of plant-inspired robots capable of long-duration service in complex, dynamic environments by pursuing significant innovations in structural, energetic, and operational designs of robots, e.g., robotic hardware that mimics plant-like “growth” and adaptation; advancement in robotic movements to cover both real-time events (seconds/minutes) and long-term processes (weeks/months); and energy harvesting components for long-duration autonomy. The research team will achieve the objective by: (1) leveraging origami principles to create robotic “trunk” components capable of discrete and energy efficient growth-like deformations via folding and self-locking; (2) using principles from continuum robots to devise “leaf” and “needle” components capable of continuous and short-duration motions for monitoring and manipulating the ambient environment; (3) laying down the foundation for energy autonomy by exploring diverse energy harvesting approaches similar to those that plants employ; and (4) integration to enable multiple time-scale operations. Finally, this new concept of plant-inspired growing robots will be validated and evaluated via fully functional prototypes applied to campus pedestrian traffic and natural habitat monitoring in long-duration outdoor demonstrations.<br/><br/>This project is supported by the cross-directorate Foundational Research in Robotics program, jointly managed and funded by the Directorates for Engineering (ENG) and Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE).<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
