Flowerpot following sunshine

Most of us know that plants are heliotropic — they grow towards the light. The slender tendrils stretch out to the sun, which is very important for the plant to initiate photosynthesis, a process that ultimately helps it grow. What if plants are given an option to move towards the light whenever required and then retract to the shade? A Chinese roboticist and entrepreneur Sun Tianqi has made this possible by modelling a six-legged toy robot to carry a potted plant on its back. The resulting plant-robot hybrid looks like a leafy crab, which can move toward the sunshine when needed, and retreat to the shade when it’s had enough. In addition to this, the robot is so designed that it can play with humans, if one touches its hard upper shell, and even make its needs known by performing a little dance when it’s out of the water.

Tianqi was quoted as saying, “Plants are usually eternally, inexplicably passive. You can cut them, burn them, and pull them out of the earth, and they do nothing. They have the fewest degrees of freedom among all the creatures in nature. But in the same way that humans have augmented our ability to move with bikes, trains, and planes, technology can give plants new freedom. With a robotic rover base, plants can experience mobility and interaction. I do hope that this project can bring some inspiration to the relationship between technology and natural default settings.”