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Sensors
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Biohybrids, Bioinspired and Biomimetic Agents for Dynamic and Complex Environments
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Biohybrids, Bioinspired and Biomimetic Agents for Dynamic and Complex Environments

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Biosensors".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (29 September 2023) | Viewed by 4977

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Donato Romano

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Guest Editor
The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, 33, 56127 Pisa, Italy
Interests: applied biology; biorobotics; biohybrid systems; neuroethology; ethorobotics; zoology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Thomas Schmickl

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Institute of Biology, Karl Franzens University Graz, Universitätsplatz 2, A-8010 Graz, Austria
Interests: swarm robotics; multi-robot; underwater robotics: underwater vehicles; artificial life computational biology ecological modeling bio-robotics swarm intelligence
Prof. Dr. Heiko Hamann

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Institute of Computer Engineering, University of Lübeck, 23562 Lübeck, Germany
Interests: robotics; artificial intelligence; swarm intelligence; swarm robotics; evolutionary computation
Dr. Farshad Arvin

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science, Durham University, Durham, UK
Interests: swarm robotics; bio-inspired swarm; collective behaviour; chronorobotics; micro-robotics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Mostafa Wahby

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Institute of Computer Engineering, University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany
Interests: swarm robotics; machine learnin; bio-hybrid systems

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

With the rise of biohybrid engineering for sensing, actuation, and computation, a game-changing paradigm shift is emerging in robotics and related domains. Often, such agents incorporate the optimization that natural selection has already subjected the corresponding organismic templates Ultimately, these technologies will yield a new class of robots that are robust and flexible in operation, scalable in numbers and deployment time and sustainable up to the point of biodegradability. Such technology can be used to develop ecosystem-friendly biosensing agents for long-term and large-scale environmental monitoring, for fundamental ecological research or for behavioral ecology studies in a novel, almost pervasive way. Already today, some of these technologies are making their first steps into nature, while others are used in biology labs to study natural organisms or are developed for application in close contact with human society within future green cities. Here, we welcome all contributions that describe concepts, design, developments, validation, benchmarking, or application of such technologies.

Dr. Donato Romano
Prof. Dr. Thomas Schmickl
Prof. Dr. Heiko Hamann
Dr. Farshad Arvin
Dr. Mostafa Wahby
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sensors is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • biohybrid system
  • bioinspiration
  • biomimetics
  • biosensor
  • ethorobotics
  • sustainable environmental monitoring technology
  • ecosystem-integrating technology
  • artificial organism

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

13 pages, 3131 KiB  
Article
Can Plants Sense Humans? Using Plants as Biosensors to Detect the Presence of Eurythmic Gestures
by Luis de la Cal, Peter A. Gloor and Moritz Weinbeer
Sensors 2023, 23(15), 6971; https://doi.org/10.3390/s23156971 - 5 Aug 2023
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3060
Abstract
This paper describes the preliminary results of measuring the impact of human body movements on plants. The scope of this project is to investigate if a plant perceives human activity in its vicinity. In particular, we analyze the influence of eurythmic gestures of [...] Read more.
This paper describes the preliminary results of measuring the impact of human body movements on plants. The scope of this project is to investigate if a plant perceives human activity in its vicinity. In particular, we analyze the influence of eurythmic gestures of human actors on lettuce and beans. In an eight-week experiment, we exposed rows of lettuce and beans to weekly eurythmic movements (similar to Qi Gong) of a eurythmist, while at the same time measuring changes in voltage between the roots and leaves of lettuce and beans using the plant spikerbox. We compared this experimental group of vegetables to a control group of vegetables whose voltage differential was also measured while not being exposed to eurythmy. We placed a plant spikerbox connected to lettuce or beans in the vegetable plot while the eurythmist was performing their gestures about 2 m away; a second spikerbox was connected to a control plant 20 m away. Using t-tests, we found a clear difference between the experimental and the control group, which was also verified with a machine learning model. In other words, the vegetables showed a noticeably different pattern in electric potentials in response to eurythmic gestures. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Biohybrids, Bioinspired and Biomimetic Agents for Dynamic and Complex Environments)
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16 pages, 1202 KiB  
Article
Improving the Accuracy of a Biohybrid for Environmental Monitoring
by Michael Vogrin, Wiktoria Rajewicz, Thomas Schmickl and Ronald Thenius
Sensors 2023, 23(5), 2722; https://doi.org/10.3390/s23052722 - 2 Mar 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1252
Abstract
Environmental monitoring should be minimally disruptive to the ecosystems that it is embedded in. Therefore, the project Robocoenosis suggests using biohybrids that blend into ecosystems and use life forms as sensors. However, such a biohybrid has limitations regarding memory—as well as power—capacities, and [...] Read more.
Environmental monitoring should be minimally disruptive to the ecosystems that it is embedded in. Therefore, the project Robocoenosis suggests using biohybrids that blend into ecosystems and use life forms as sensors. However, such a biohybrid has limitations regarding memory—as well as power—capacities, and can only sample a limited number of organisms. We model the biohybrid and study the degree of accuracy that can be achieved by using a limited sample. Importantly, we consider potential misclassification errors (false positives and false negatives) that lower accuracy. We suggest the method of using two algorithms and pooling their estimations as a possible way of increasing the accuracy of the biohybrid. We show in simulation that a biohybrid could improve the accuracy of its diagnosis by doing so. The model suggests that for the estimation of the population rate of spinning Daphnia, two suboptimal algorithms for spinning detection outperform one qualitatively better algorithm. Further, the method of combining two estimations reduces the number of false negatives reported by the biohybrid, which we consider important in the context of detecting environmental catastrophes. Our method could improve environmental modeling in and outside of projects such as Robocoenosis and may find use in other fields. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Biohybrids, Bioinspired and Biomimetic Agents for Dynamic and Complex Environments)
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