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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.