Robots today are expected to operate in a variety of scenarios, being able to cope with uncertain situations and to react quickly to changes in the environment. In this scenario a strong relationship between nature and technology plays a major role, with the winning approach of evaluating natural systems to abstract principles for new designs. Such biological principles traditionally originate from animal models for robots that can walk, swim, crawl, or fly. In this workshop we aim at discussing and constructively comparing some technological solutions and their biological models coming from both animals and plants. In the animal paradigm a function is often related to an organ or compartment. Instead plants are networked, decentralized, modular, redundant, and resilient. Plants are able to move, control, sense, but they do in a different way with respect animals or other living beings.

PLANTOIDS, ANIMALOIDS and HUMANOIDS represent the starting point of the event, in which features and capabilities of these robotic platforms are analyzed and applicative scenarios proposed. Under this scientific and technological umbrella, we will compare ideas, biological features, and technological translations coming from the two Kingdoms and related to areas of interest in robotics: movement, sensing and control. Movement, usually ascribed to animals, is also pertinent to plants that move in a very efficient way. New actuators and materials, muscle- or not muscle-like, will be discussed, together with bioinspired sensing systems, these including: the stick insect sensory system focusing on active touch; flow sensing in fish lateral line systems, and plant inspired tactile sensing. Control “with and without brain” is the concluding part, involving: plants, as information-processing organisms with complex communication, where the “command centre” is mainly at root apex, for new signalling modelling and distributed networks; octopus, with distributed control in its peripheral nervous system, for new distributed embodied control models; and, computational models of Central Pattern Generators, will be presented for locomotion control in quadruped robots. The discussion sessions during the whole workshop will be chaired and guided by a professional science communicator, who will give a view “out of the box” of biorobotics and its future impacts on the society.