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Designing plant-driven actuators presents an opportunity to create new types of devices that grow, age, and decay, such as robots that embody these qualities in their physical structure. Plant-robot hybrids that grow and decay incorporate unpredictable and gradual transformations inherent across living organisms and suggest an alternative to the design principles of immediacy, responsiveness, control, accuracy, and durability commonly found in robotic design. To explore this, we present a design space of primitives for plant-driven robotic actuators. Proof-of-concept prototypes illustrate how concepts like slow change, slow movement, decay, and destruction can be incorporated into robotic forms. We describe the design considerations required for building plant-driven actuators for robots, including experimental findings regarding the mechanical properties of plant forces. Finally, we speculate on the potential benefits of plant-robot hybrids to interactive domains such as robotics. 

Biological skin has numerous functions like protection, sensing, expression, and regulation. On the contrary, a robot’s skin is usually regarded as a passive and static separation between the body and environment. In this article, we explore the design opportunities of a robot’s skin as a socially expressive medium. Inspired by living organisms, we discuss the roles of interactive robotic skin from four perspectives: expression, perception, regulation, and mechanical action. We focus on the expressive function of skin to sketch design concepts and present a flexible technical method for embodiment. The proposed method integrates pneumatically actuated dynamic textures on soft skin, with forms and kinematic patterns generating a variety of visual and haptic expressions. We demonstrate the proposed design space with six texture-changing skin prototypes and discuss their expressive capacities. 

Touchibo is a modular robotic platform for enriching interpersonal communication in human-robot group activities, suitable for children with mixed visual abilities. Touchibo incorporates several modalities, including dynamic textures, scent, audio, and light. Two prototypes are demonstrated for supporting storytelling activities and mediating group conversations between children with and without visual impairment. Our goal is to provide an inclusive platform for children to interact with each other, perceive their emotions, and become more aware of how they impact others. 

This paper proposes and evaluates the use of image classification for detailed, full-body human-robot tactile interaction. A camera positioned below a translucent robot skin captures shadows generated from human touch and infers social gestures from the captured images. This approach enables rich tactile interaction with robots without the need for the sensor arrays used in traditional social robot tactile skins. It also supports the use of touch interaction with non-rigid robots, achieves high-resolution sensing for robots with different sizes and shape of surfaces, and removes the requirement of direct contact with the robot. We demonstrate the idea with an inflatable robot and a standing-alone testing device, an algorithm for recognizing touch gestures from shadows that uses Densely Connected Convolutional Networks, and an algorithm for tracking positions of touch and hovering shadows. Our experiments show that the system can distinguish between six touch gestures under three lighting conditions with 87.5 - 96.0% accuracy, depending on the lighting, and can accurately track touch positions as well as infer motion activities in realistic interaction conditions. Additional applications for this method include interactive screens on inflatable robots and privacy-maintaining robots for the home. 

Abstract The 2022 heatwave in China featured record‐shattering high temperatures, raising questions about its origin and possible link to global warming. Here we show that the maximum temperature anomalies over Central China reached 13.1°C in the summer of 2022, which is ∼4.2σ above the 1981–2010 mean with a return period of tens of thousands of years. Our results suggested that the persistent high‐pressure anomaly and associated extreme heatwave likely resulted mainly from internal variability, although anthropogenic warming has increased the probability of such extreme heatwaves. We also estimate that the 2022‐like heatwave becomes six to seven times more likely under persistent high‐pressure conditions when compared to stochastic circulation states. Due to a shift toward warmer mean temperatures and a flattening of the probability distribution function, such rare extreme heatwaves are projected to become much more common at a global warming level of 4°C, occurring once about every 8.5 years.