Plant intelligence for better swarm robots

John Innes Centre scientists will participate in new €2 million EU-funded research to programme more "intelligent" and adaptable robot swarms.

The collaborative research will also be useful for improving other complex systems that can be challenged by their environment, such as smart phone networks.

"Plants achieve exquisite organisation and spatially-controlled division of labour," said Dr Veronica Grieneisen from the John Innes Centre.

"They form complex patterns and deal with conflict or damage by acting locally but for the benefit of the whole."

One application of better robot swarms could be space exploration. In unknown terrain, they need to be able to organise themselves in an unpredictable way, to effectively cover an area rather than cluster and to sample materials as they move.

The scientists will look at plants, growing limbs and marine animals, investigating how they repair themselves, how they organise themselves and how local decisions between a few cells can affect the whole.

"Biological systems have evolved elegant ways to govern large numbers of autonomous agents," said Dr Grieneisen.

"We will explore how to make use of those fundamental principles, evolved over millennia, to inspire cutting edge technology."

As they grow, repair and respond to their environment plants are able to coherently control the expression of thousands of genes. They do this using gene regulatory networks.

Comparing networks between vastly different biological systems will help the scientists identify commonalties and fundamental principles that can be applied to technology.

The scientists will buy hundreds of robots into which they can programme the insights gained through the research. As the robots become more adaptable they will be set different challenges, such as navigating a maze, searching for an object or surveying an area.

Provided by Norwich BioScience Institutes