Scientists in the UK, Spain and Italy have developed a way to monitor the effect of climate change and pollution on the environment, by creating aspecial kinds of plant which have in-built sensors.
The PLEASED project (PLants Employed As SEnsing Devices) led by the Italian SME WLAB and part funded by the EU has developed ‘talking plants’ which act as environmental monitors.
Once inside the plant, the micro-sensors collect the plant's signals, analyse them, combine them with those of other plants nearby and produce a clear analysis of the environment around it.
Dr Vitaletti, project coordinator and Chief Technology Officer at WLAB said:
“If understanding is the first necessary step to change, plants can contribute by providing us with a valuable tool to better understand and monitor our environment. But then change is up to us.”
More than €1 million of EU funding has been invested in PLEASED, under the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) programme.
The plants, known as "cyborg plants" react to various elements such as acid, ozone or salt. Dr Vitaletti and his team have been creating their prototypes from low-cost, readily-available components.
The PLEASED project is making its architecture open; and the data it collects freely available in the hope that the PLEASED open community will grow and help them to achieve better and more general results, by performing their own experiments and improving its design.
"The availability of a large, high quality dataset is necessary for our project to develop. To use these cyborg plants as sensing devices we need to develop classification algorithms capable of understanding the signals generated by plants,” said Dr Vitaletti. “In particular, we hope that researchers will be able to test their own classification algorithms on the dataset.”
Other groundbreaking projects inspired by plants are funded by FET – for example, PLANTOID which uses plant roots as a model for robotics. This new technology could revolutionise soil monitoring and exploration. The SWARM-ORGAN project tries to understand complex living systems such as the growing of a plant, or cells making an organ, and to apply the principles to technological systems, in particular more intelligent and adaptable robot swarms.
The EU is investing €2.7 billion in FET under the new research programme Horizon 2020 (2014-2020) – it sees research in the next generation of technologies as key for Europe’s competitiveness. This represents a nearly threefold increase in budget compared to the previous research programme, FP7. FET actions are part of the Excellent science pillar of Horizon 2020.
The EU is currently holding a public consultation on Future and Emerging Technologies which is seeking is to identify promising and potentially game-changing directions for future research in any technological domain – deadline for responses is 30 June 2014.
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