Flour and oat “robots” could help replenish forests

In Italy, researchers at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia have developed a “biohybrid” robot from flour and oat fruit that can be filled with seeds and fertilizers to help reforestation.

Dubbed HybriBot, the robot features “oat appendices” that move in the presence of air moisture, building elastic energy and replacing the need for batteries or other artificial energy sources.

The development of HybriBot was supported by the European project i-Seed, which is coordinated by IIT associate director for robotics, Barbara Mazzolai, Associate Director for Robotics at the IIT, and the innovation ecosystem RAISE (Robotics and AI for Socio-economic Empowerment).

The work was published in a recent issue of Advanced Materials.