Science of Soft Robots – Interdisciplinary integration of mechatronics, material science, and bio-computing

B01-13 : Creation of plant function based smart machine installing Mimosa pudica

Summary

Leader Yo Tanaka (RIKEN)

It is a common issue in various fields in the current society to develop clean and efficient devices alternating conventional machine systems such as fossil fuel and electric power as its products.
As a solution, the we have focused on biological functions which express various and efficient functions and the materials can be returned to the nature, and actually developed new functional devices based on micro/anno device technologies. However, it has been a challenging issue to maintain and install the functions of complicated animals’ tissue including nerve and vascular systems in addition to an ethical problem. Thus, just single function devices were demonstrated.
To solve this issue, the we focus on plants that the growth and partial usage are easy. Here, mimosa pudica is used which has multi-sensing, communication and actuation functions by mechanical, light and thermal stimuli. We aim to integrate these functions to realize smart (multifunctional) devices including fluid controllers, robots or power generators in this study.