Robotanics – Exploring design for plant-hybrid robots
Dec 2023 - ongoing
Using plant-hybrid technologies presents an unusual design opportunity, by combining living plants with technology. This master’s thesis delves into the integration of plant-hybrid robotics, exploring human-plant interaction systems.
The study explores the potential design implications of plant-hybrid robots. The concept behind the project focusses on public settings where interactions with humans are unavoidable. The project aims to stimulate design for physical and psychological connections between humans, nature and technology.
We envision an extremely slow-moving swarm of plant-robots that subtly roam public indoor spaces. This way the concept subtly tries to express the passage of time.
Plants lack the capacity for verbal communication or auditory perception like humans. Instead, the concept allows the plants to rely on sensing through its leaves. The physical properties of the selected plant, Dypsis Lutescens, gives a unique character to the plant’s movement.
A single prototype of the envisioned swarm was developed during the project and used in experiments exploring inattentional blindness and showed that this allows the plant to quietly navigate shared spaces with humans without causing distraction. Moreover, varying slow speeds affect the plant’s physiological dynamics uniquely, triggering different responses. This case study contributes to the field of human-plant interaction by highlighting the potential for plant-hybrid robots to coexist alongside humans.