Animal-like robots, such as quadrupedal (四足的) robot dogs, continue to be popular. However, Italian roboticist Barbara Mazzolai argues that the robotics field has proved less keen to investigate another category of living things — plants. She owes this to a misconception that plants are capable of neither motion nor perception. “It’s not true at all,” she says.

Mazzolai and her team at the Bioinspired Soft Robotics Laboratory recently introduced “FiloBot”, a robot based on climbing plants, which is capable of growing, attaching to supports, and journeying through environments in response to external stimuli (刺激) .

To survive in forests, a climbing plant must grow out of the soil and travel along the ground searching a support to attach to. This requires a structure capable of bearing its own weight. Once a support is located, though, the plant must switch strategy-securing itself around the object and then growing towards light as quickly as possible to outcompete other plants. To choose the best growing angle, it uses information from light and gravity receptors distributed along each shoot.

FiloBot imitates these behaviours using sensors on its main shoot, which is also equipped with a spool (卷轴) of plastic and a heating element. By melting and forcing out the plastic, it can 3D-print itself. Depending on brightness and direction, it changes the heat the plastic is exposed to — lower temperatures result in a more breakable body that increases in size more rapidly, while higher temperatures make a stronger body that grow more slowly.

The researchers found that these functionalities enable FiloBot to move through complex environments flexibly, making it suitable for potential applications including environmental monitoring in hard-to-reach locations or unstable disaster sites.

FiloBot is not the only plant-like robot the team is developing. Mazzolai hopes that our robots will motivate other roboticists to take clues from plants. The plant kingdom is another world, she says, with a completely different approach to the animal one. “We can develop completely new technologies and artificial solutions, because it is so different.”

Scientists from Georgia Tech have developed a new robot named ESTHER (Experimental Sport Tennis Wheelchair Robot), which can move around the court and even return human serves.

The team believes the robot could serve as a training partner (搭档) for professional players in the future, lowering the pressure of training with another human.

The robot is the brainchild of Georgia Tech’s Matthew Gombolay, professor of robotics in the School of Interactive Computing. He wanted to develop a better training challenge than a ball feeder that stays in one place, one that would act like an always on-call partner or even team up with someone in doubles matches. The result is ESTHER, an adapted wheelchair tennis chair that can race to balls at ten metres per second and probably outplay a human.

Mr Gombolay explains: “The wheelchair has the ability to rapidly move around the court and get into position (恰当位置) to hit a ground stroke (击落地球). ESTHER can move up to two metres after a ball is struck to hit a successful return, which is comparable to the longest distance moved by human players for 80 per cent of shots (击球).”

The robot was named in homage to well-known wheelchair tennis player Esther Vergeer, who held the world No. 1 position in women’s wheelchair tennis for almost 13 years straight.

The team placed a network of cameras around a tennis court and used computer vision algorithms (视觉算法) to help ESTHER recognise an incoming tennis ball. Using cameras from different positions, they could know where the ball is in the air and feed this information to ESTHER. The team reached a breakthrough when they successfully and continually programmed ESTHER to track the tennis ball coming toward it and to hit a return.

ESTHER will now be developed to act as a highly-skilled tennis player.

An Israeli food technology company, called Israel’s Steakholder Foods, has teamed up with Singapore-based Umami Meats to have 3D printed the first ever ready-to-cook fish fillet(鱼片),using animal cells cultivated and grown in a laboratory.

Umami Meats obtains cells from groupers(石斑鱼)and grows them into muscle and fat.Steakholder Foods then adds them to biological ink suited for special 3D printers. Eventually,there is a successful outcome:a narrow fillet that has the feature of sea-caught fish.

Umami Meats hopes to bring its first products to market next year. But the cell cultivation, where the lab-grown fish is developed, is still too expensive to match the cost of traditional seafood. Steakholder Foods believes the level of these products will be higher as time goes by,and the prices linked to producing them will decrease.

It has the flakiness(片状)of traditional fish and it is hard to tell the difference after it is fried. And it is incredible that making such fish fillet is not an effort for the 3D printer. A glass dish slides back and forth in the 3D printer, with the white finger-length fillet adding mass with each pass.

“This process is simpler than beef, but there are some disadvantages. Cow stem cell shave been studied extensively but much less is known about fish,” said Umami’s chief executive,Mihir Pershad. The scientists are working on fish stem cell biology and they have figured out a process for some fish, hoping to add three other endangered species in the coming months.

Meeting the price of fish from the sea will be a key challenge. Consumers choose food,based on its prices, how it tastes and what it can do for the environment.