The GrowBot project (H2020 EU FET-Proactive) has launched a new generation of robots inspired by the amazing abilities of climbing plants, named GrowBots.

GrowBots are low-mass and low-volume robots that can anchor themselves, negotiate voids, and climb, in places where current climbing robots based on wheels, legs, or rails would get stuck or fall.

GrowBots also rely on a distinctive green-energy character that creates a “plant-robot, bio-hybrid symbiosis" to convert environmental mechanical energy (wind & rain) into harvested electrical energy.

A variable-stiffness tendril-like soft robot (polyethylene terephthalate (PET) tube) based on reversible osmotic actuation. An osmosis-driven system that controls its turgidity and performs sophisticated tasks.

Plants act as an internal generator structure that converts mechanic into electric energy (bio-hybrid energy source) during a touch stimulus by a mechanism known as contact or tribo-electrification.

A bioinspired microfabricated reversible attachment material. A flexible and biodegradable material developed using two-photon lithography technology.