Silk, Robots, and the Future of Forests

Spider silks and webs are wonderful examples of Nature’s Design by Evolution. Millions of years of life-dinner arms races between flies and spiders have led to Bio-materials and Bio-engineering ranging from tunable nano-scale composite structures to complex self-assembling micro-machines. Importantly (for possible applications) silks are not only interesting as natural materials but have a bright future both as models to guide our understanding of energy efficient bio-polymers but also as prototype models to guide the design of novel polymer systems be it in the areas of Materials, Engineering or indeed Medicine.

Traditional techniques for forestry and biodiversity measurement are slow and labourious. To make data-driven decisions for sustainable forestry, accurate proximal sensing is needed. In this talk I will discuss how low cost, portable 3D mapping technology is being developed in Oxford Robotics Institute which can quickly and easily reconstruct each tree and its key traits in the time it takes to walk a plot. I will also talk about a prototype system which uses a four-legged walking robot to do the hard work – ducking in and around each tree to make a complete map. The robots are here to help!