Many of us probably picture robots as roughly human-shaped or perhaps as little more than mobile computers.
But one [European Union] project is taking inspiration from the smart, efficient strategies of plants in order to develop a new generation of robots and ICT technologies, such as sensing or distributed adaptive intelligence.
As Dr Barbara Mazzolai of the Center for Micro-BioRobotics at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), the project coordinator describes it:
“The goal of the project is to design, prototype, and validate a new generation of robotic systems, as well as ICT hardware and software technologies, inspired by plant roots. Just like their natural counterparts, these robotic systems have distributed sensing, actuation and intelligence to perform soil exploration and monitoring task.”
I, for one, welcome this scientific development as the first step in the forging of a new generation of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes movies.