Growing, Adapting, Morphing: Nature-Inspired Principles for Soft Robotics
Title
Growing, Adapting, Morphing: Nature-Inspired Principles for Soft Robotics
Speaker
Barbara Mazzolai - Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT)
Abstract
Natural organisms are inherently adaptive. They constantly learn, evolve, and refine their behaviours. Since the emergence of life on Earth, 3.8 billion years ago, species have developed strategies finely tuned to their environments, ensuring survival across generations. Nature does not aim for perfection; it prioritizes evolution. It experiments, recombines existing solutions, and adapts based on outcomes.
So why are roboticists looking to nature for the next robotics revolution?
By studying the lifeforms and evolutionary strategies of natural organisms, we can extract fundamental principles for designing robots with functional embodiments and energy-efficient behaviours, essential traits for machines that must operate in unstructured, unpredictable environments.
In our work, we draw inspiration from plants and soft-bodied animals to design robots with high morphological adaptability, distributed sensing, and energy-saving mechanisms. In this presentation, I will show how soft animals and plants inspire the development of multifunctional materials for morphological adaptation and computation, growth-based locomotion strategies, climbing and adhesion mechanisms, multisensory information processing, and distributed functional architectures. I will also discuss how these biological insights can underpin new generations of robotic systems for exploration and monitoring of real-world environments across scales.
Bio
Barbara Mazzolai is the Associate Director for Robotics and the Director of the Bioinspired Soft Robotics Laboratory at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa, Italy. From February 2011 to March 2021, she served as Director of the IIT Center for Micro-BioRobotics (CMBR).
From 2016 to 2024, she was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Tübingen and Stuttgart, Germany). She currently serves on the SAB of the Max Planck Queensland Centre (MPQC) for the Materials Science of Extracellular Matrices, as well as on the Advisory Committee of the Cluster of Excellence Living, Adaptive, and Energy-autonomous Materials Systems (livMatS, Freiburg, Germany).
Since 2024, she has been a contract professor for a course in Soft Robotics in the Department of Mechanics at the Polytechnic University of Milan. She is currently a member of the Administrative Committee (AdCom) of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and serves as Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Soft Robotics journal. Since 2025, she has also been Senior Editor for the Soft Robotics area of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) journal.
Since 2022, she has been a member of the International Research and Innovation Advisory Board (IRIAB) of the University Campus Bio-Medico of Rome (UCBM). In 2017, she was a Visiting Faculty at the Aerial Robotics Lab, Department of Aeronautics, at Imperial College London.
Her research focuses on bioinspired soft robotics, combining principles from biology and engineering to advance both technological innovation and scientific understanding. She has coordinated several EU-funded projects in this field, including PLANTOID, GrowBot, and I-SEED. In May 2021, she began her European Research Council (ERC) project I-Wood, focused on Forest Intelligence: Robotic Networks Inspired by the Wood Wide Web. She is the author or co-author of more than 260 publications in international journals, books, and conference proceedings.
When
Monday, March 9th, 16:00
Where
Room 706, UniGe DIBRIS/DIMA, Via Dodecaneso 35