快猫短视频

Many plants naturally bend towards bright light. Now a robot has been built that copies a technique plants use to do the same thing.

Creating a robot that can sense and adjust automatically to its environment without any need for programming or maintenance is one of the major goals of robotics. A machine that could control and regulate itself in this way can then behave like a living organism, says Bilge Baytekin at Bilkent University in Turkey.

Baytekin and her colleagues created a robot plant made from paper that can automatically bend towards the sun and open its leaves, just like a real plant. While this movement has been mimicked in other ways, such as by using motors, this robot copies a mechanism unique to plants 鈥� transpiration 鈥� to track the sun.

Plants use transpiration to transport water from their roots to their leaves, where it evaporates. 鈥淧lants are highly energy efficient and we thought that transpiration could be an easy way to make our plants move, without any sort of motor,鈥� Baytekin says.

The robot鈥檚 stem and leaves are made from origami paper, while its roots are made of filter paper. Packs of gel, placed along the robot鈥檚 stem and between the stem and the leaves, mimic the water-filled tissue of plants and hold the stem upright when hydrated.

The stem is laser-cut with precise grooves. When light shines on the gel packs from a certain angle, the water inside them evaporates. Once the packs lose more water than they draw in from the roots, they shrink, bending the plant towards the light and opening the robot鈥檚 leaves.

The robot works in artificial and natural light, but Baytekin says it may need to be made from more robust materials to withstand wind and other environmental conditions.

鈥淭he whole idea behind robots made of soft materials is that we want to eventually eliminate silicon chips,鈥� says Jonathan Rossiter at the University of Bristol, UK. 鈥淲e want the materials to do the computing themselves. These robots are an elegant simple step forward for that idea,鈥� he says.