Abstract
Biohybrid robotics takes an engineering approach to the expansion and exploitation of biological behaviours for application to automated tasks. Here, we identify the construction of living buildings and infrastructure as a high-potential application domain for biohybrid robotics, and review technological advances relevant to its future development. Construction, civil infrastructure maintenance and building occupancy in the last decades have comprised a major portion of economic production, energy consumption and carbon emissions. Integrating biological organisms into automated construction tasks and permanent building components therefore has high potential for impact. Live materials can provide several advantages over standard synthetic construction materials, including self-repair of damage, increase rather than degradation of structural performance over time, resilience to corrosive environments, support of biodiversity, and mitigation of urban heat islands. Here, we review relevant technologies, which are currently disparate. They span robotics, self-organizing systems, artificial life, construction automation, structural engineering, architecture, bioengineering, biomaterials, and molecular and cellular biology. In these disciplines, developments relevant to biohybrid construction and living buildings are in the early stages, and typically are not exchanged between disciplines. We, therefore, consider this review useful to the future development of biohybrid engineering for this highly interdisciplinary application.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 20190238 |
| Journal | Journal of the Royal Society Interface |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue number | 156 |
| ISSN | 1742-5689 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 26.07.2019 |
Funding
Data accessibility. This article has no additional data. Authors’ contributions. M.K.H. organized the overall writing and editing process and made the primary writing contribution. H.H., S.v.M., D.N.H. and M.W. wrote large sections of the paper; T.Sch., P.Z., T.Skr., M.D.S., R.K. and W.K. also wrote sections of the paper. H.H., S.v.M., T.Sch., P.A. and K.S. supervised overall paper development. M.K.H., H.H., S.v.M., P.Z., D.N.H., M.W. and P.A. made editing contributions. All authors contributed to defining the content of the paper and to the writing process. The key open challenges handled in the paper were developed collectively among all authors. Competing interests. We declare we have no competing interests. Funding. Project flora robotica has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the FET grant agreement, no. 640959.
