Barbara Mazzolai and her plantoid
Bioinspiration is a common strategy in different fields of science and technology: from biomedics to aeronautics, men often took inspiration from Mother Nature to reach their goals. Barbara Mazzolai, however, created a completely new concept of bioinspiration when in 2012 she theorized the first robot able to autonomously modify its shape and size.
After a bachelor degree in Biology at University of Pisa in 1995, she attained an international master in Eco-Management at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in 1998. She always had a passion for the living world and decided to dedicate herself to a career in the field of technical sciences, becoming vice director of the department of robotics and director of the department of bioinspired robotics at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). In 2011 she did a PhD in Microsystems Engineering at Tor Vergata University in Rome.
It was just in 2010 that she started the project that would have led to her nomination among the “25 most genious women in the sector” (RoboHub, 2015): the plantoid (FP7-293431). Even though it’s still a mostly pure theoretical concept, Mazzolai proposed the model of plant roots as a strategy to create robots able to explore where the human being still hasn’t achieved. In particular, the idea was to create a structure able to grow through the integration of new material based on stimuli from the environment, like chemical concentrations, temperature and pressure: by using sensors, the plantoid could alter its conformation to reach the desired one.
Which concrete applications could such a technology have? Just think about space, for example, where the employment of a similar tool could lead to an easier exploration of new planets; or the medical field, where it would be possible to create mini-invasive endoscopies capable of moving inside the patient reducing the attrition with their internal organs. From January 2019, she is part of the European GrowBot project, which goal is to develop low-mass and low-volume robots able to anchor and grow where modern creeping bots cannot go. We could even state that this is a practical concretization of what had remained just an idea: thanks to the cooperation of many brilliant scientists and EU’s contribution, Mazzolai is working to bring the plantoid to life. Amongst her numerous projects, we can find OCTOPUS (FP7-231608), HydroNet (FP7-212790), DustBot (FP6-045299) and EMECAP (QLK4-CT-2000-00489).
She is author/co-author of more than 270 papers that appeared in international journals and conference proceedings. In the same year, she published her first book, “La natura geniale” (Longanesi, 2019), in which she illustrates how taking inspiration from the evolution mechanisms of plants instead of animals could represent the future of technology and engineering. Great importance is given to the environmental problem, fundamental for researchers and workers in the field of future robotics. The question brought up by the author is the following: if adapting the environment to the self, like animals do, up until now has done more harm than good, could adapting our technologies to the environment, like plants do, be the solution?
Her second essay was published in 2021 under the title “Il futuro raccontato dalle piante” and it aims, among everything, to deepen the concept of bioinspiration to develop new technologies with the final goal of “reversing the curse” that humanity has taken, therefore wanting to defend climate and biodiversity. Compostable robots used to monitor the pollution of the waters are just an example of how, according to the writer, robotics and artificial intelligence can interact in improving the condition in which our planet currently is. Her last project, started January 2021, is closely related to the topics of the latter book: I-Seed, which objective is to develop miniaturized robots with morphology and dispersive properties similar to seeds, so that a more responsible in-situ monitoring of soil and air could become possible.
Scientist, researcher and author, Barbara Mazzolai revamped and is continuously updating the way in which robotics is perceived in the scientific community.
She won prizes such as Marisa Bellisario e Carla Fendi, her last award was conferred by the European Community in 2020, when she won the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant for the project “I-Wood”, for robotics networks with communication technologies inspired by the ones used by trees in woods.