Flora Robotica is a 4-year project funded under the EU-Horizon 2020 Future and Emerging Technologies Proactive Action. The project runs from April 2015 – March 2019.
The project’s objective is to develop and investigate closely linked symbiotic relationships between robots and natural plants and to explore the potentials of a plant-robot society able to produce architectural artefacts and living spaces.
Flora Robotica responds to the work-programme theme ‘Knowing, doing and being: cognition beyond problem-solving’, the goal of which is to establish new foundations for future robotics and other artificial cognitive systems with clear progress beyond current capabilities and design concepts.
The project assembles a highly cross-disciplinary team drawn from the fields of Computer Science, Robotics, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Zoology, Advanced Mechatronics & Environmental Sensing and Architecture.
María Castellanos has a degree and a PhD in Fine Arts from the University of Vigo, Spain.
Alberto Valverde is an artist and a technologist with a background in mathematics, with a solid experience in system design, interactive environments, robotics and programming.
They started to work together in 2009 under the name of uh513. Since then, they have been working in a variety of projects, focus in the relationships between humans and machines and creating technological interfaces to enhance human capabilities using technology.
The Plants Sense (2018) is an installation that allows the audience, to know and experience the secret language of plants. It is a transdisciplinary work which connects art, science, technology and society. The work consists of an interactive garden in which different sensors measure the electrical oscillations of the connected plants, and show their biochemical reactions to the human presence and the environment that surrounds them. All this information is processed and translated into vibrations and low frequency sounds that allow the visitor to perceive the plants through a wearable. Likewise, different interfaces in the garden provide the public to experiment and feel in their own hands the registered reactions of the plants, through different electronic devices. This interaction makes possible the communication between humans and plants, thus reaching the understanding of the vegetal language, unattainable without the help of the robotic systems developed by the artist. This device translates and transmits precisely those signals that humans, due to our limited perceptual system, cannot receive in other way.
The Plant Sense had a high impact in the Tech Project and the collaboration with Flora Robotica took the artistic proposal into a new direction. It was decided to go beyond the initial wearable device and a whole garden was built in which the plants control the other devices placed there. This collaboration is defined by its professional approach to high technical installation achieving an excellent artistic work. The artists open up new ways of research to Flora Robotica, developed upon their idea to give the control to the plants instead of machines. Working together the artists and engineers from Flora Robotica, made possible the communication between humans and plants, thus reaching the understanding of the vegetal language, unattainable without the help of the robotic systems developed by the artist. This device translates and transmits precisely those signals that humans, due to limited perceptual system, cannot receive in other way.
