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Constructing Living Buildings: A Review of Relevant Technologies for a Novel Application of Biohybrid Robotics

Summary

This research explores how we could create buildings that are partially alive by combining robots with living organisms like plants and material-depositing animals. Living buildings could offer several advantages over traditional construction, including self-repair capabilities, improved structural performance over time, and environmental benefits. Here’s how this research could impact everyday life: • Future buildings could be more sustainable and environmentally friendly by incorporating living materials that naturally grow and adapt • Structures could repair themselves when damaged, reducing maintenance costs and extending building lifespans • Living buildings could help reduce urban heat and support local ecosystems by incorporating natural biological processes • Construction costs could potentially be reduced by having buildings that partially construct themselves through guided biological growth • Buildings could become more resilient to harsh environments through the natural adaptation capabilities of living organisms

Background

Biohybrid robotics takes an engineering approach to expanding and exploiting biological behaviors for automated tasks. Construction, civil infrastructure maintenance and building occupancy comprise 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.

Objective

To identify construction of living buildings and infrastructure as a high-potential application domain for biohybrid robotics, and review technological advances relevant to its future development. The review aims to examine which biological organisms can responsively deposit or shape material, what existing autonomous technologies could interact with such organisms, what methods exist for incorporating living organisms into construction, and which robot control approaches are relevant for managing biohybrid construction processes.

Results

The review found that 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. The authors identified relevant technologies across disciplines that are currently disparate but could be integrated for biohybrid construction, including robotic interaction with organisms, bio-mechanical hybrid structures, and self-organizing control systems.

Conclusion

While there are numerous examples combining living organisms, robots, and construction in various ways, these approaches remain quite disparate from one another. The field has broad gaps and remaining challenges to achieve construction of a complete biohybrid living building. Key challenges include managing different timescales between robotic and biological processes, monitoring and modulating environmental conditions and physiological reactions over long periods, and developing appropriate structural modeling approaches for living materials.
  • Published in:Journal of the Royal Society Interface,
  • Study Type:Review,
  • Source: 10.1098/rsif.2019.0238
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