Speaker
Description
Among living organisms, plants offer a rich repertoire of biological strategies for interacting with complex and heterogeneous environments, shaped by millions of years of evolution across both terrestrial and aquatic habitats.
In this talk, we explore how key functional principles from plant biology can be translated into plant-inspired and biohybrid microfabricated systems, and how the development of these systems can, in turn, enable applications in sustainable agriculture and robotics. We present a new class of miniaturized, multifunctional plant-inspired machines designed for applications such as in situ environmental monitoring and targeted cargo delivery in confined and unstructured environments.
These systems combine bioinspired design with biohybrid approaches, integrating morphological and biomechanical features derived from both terrestrial and aquatic plants. Advanced fabrication techniques, including microcomputed tomography, two-photon lithography, and bioprinting, enable the development of scalable and sustainable prototypes. When tested in real-world settings (such as soil, leaf tissues, and aquatic environments), these systems exhibit plant-like strategies for actuation, attachment, and interaction with natural substrates.
Overall, this work demonstrates how plant biology can inform the design of adaptive systems for sustainable environments, while also providing a complementary experimental platform to investigate functional plant traits and ecosystem-relevant interactions, with implications for ecology, environmental restoration, and bioinspired engineering.
