Mimicking Adaptation and Plasticity in WORMS: the MAPWORMS Project

The capability of living beings to perform tasks in response to environmental cues has inspired researchers to develop new technological solutions to allow robots controlling their structure, actively. In this regard, marine Annelida, which has adapted to all marine habitats, even the extreme ones, represents an intriguing source of inspiration. In traditional robotics, precise position control is typically accomplished by central control of rigid structures. By contrast, nature puts in place a distributed control paradigm and exploits the elastic compliance of body parts (i.e., morphological computation). In this sense, soft robotics and material science have opened up new avenues for the development of bioinspired machines able to execute tasks in unstructured environments, in a safe and compliant manner, as nature does. Recently, a wide set of stimuli-responsive hydrogels have been proposed as promising building material candidates for signal-triggered shape-morphing devices, including medical ones. In particular, DNA-based hydrogels exploiting structural and functional information encoded in nucleic acids represent an attractive solution for reactive synthetic machines. In this scenario, the MAPWORMS project proposes a radically new paradigm aimed at reproducing the complexity of living organisms and their capability to react to environmental cues without implementing a central control strategy as in traditional machines, but by relying on synthetic actuation units integrated into a smart shape-morphing and modular architecture with limited environmental impact