Verification of Self-Healing Ability by Plant Root Growth Achieving Plant-Symbiotic Robot Skin

For a robot, its skin is an important element that determines its performance and rigidity. Although a wide variety of robots have been actively developed, the performance of their skins is best when they are new. Research has been conducted on self-healing robots, however, their repair capabilities are limited and their performance after repair is no better than their original performance. In contrast, organisms can self-heal and can improve their individual capabilities through growth. Therefore, we aim to incorporate plants into the robot skin to give it different capabilities from conventional robots. In this study, we focused on the rapid growth of plant sprouts and grew pea sprouts and measured their root strength in a tensile test. Furthermore, we connected the two separated sponges by growing pea sprout roots, and confirmed their strength through tensile experimentation. This result indicated the possibility of using plant growth for self-healing capabilities.