Emerging Technologies Inspired by Plants - Bioinspired Approaches for Human-Centric Technologies - page 129

provide in this field is related to the implementation of new materials and mecha-
nisms directly inspired from the plant movements. Here, we emphasize how
osmosis plays a key role in the active movements of plants, at different timescales,
providing several examples on how it has been fruitfully used to actuate some
artificial systems. In pursuing a fully bioinspired mechanism for an artificial root,
we show how a forward osmosis-based system can be carefully designed to build a
microscale actuator.
The final aim of this research is to invent systems that can perform because of the
biomimetic structures of sensing, actuation, and body parts. A bioinspired-
integrated approach reduces the complexity of control that is needed to achieve a
fully bioinspired behavior of an artificial root. Therefore, we indicate some prelim-
inary work related to novel design concepts and different approaches to shape soft
materials for implementing plant-like passive mechanisms. This is an important
challenge for the material and engineering communities: the quest is for a new
vision in investigating and exploiting bioinspired approaches to bring simple but
highly performing solutions.
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