Biohybrid Realities - Interactive Plant Models

Closed Human-Computer Interaction Computer Science Games Engineering Bachelor Master Project Thesis Games Research Lab

Background

The EU-project Flora Robotica [1] explores the potential of bringing together plants and robots. Simple sensory-motor robotic units can water and groom the plants, provide them with scaffoldings or direct their growth, for instance by shining or shielding off light. Based on such interactions, the plants’ growth can be directed around the clock and for long periods of time. As a result, completely new forms of plant-based artefacts and architectures may emerge. The prospect of years, decades, potentially even centuries of growth and evolution of biohybrid systems requires us to run computational simulations to visualise and plan the outcome over time. The Biohybrid Realities project aims at making such simulations possible. Previously, we have shown how an augmen- ted reality interface for biohybrid system visualisation and planning could work [2]. In this context, we have deployed a very rudimentary developmental plant model [3], which we have furthered to not only incorporate phototropism (growth towards light) but also lignification (the stem becoming increasingly rigid), shade avoidance and other plant behaviours.

Tasks

This project focusses on refactoring and refining the interactive plant growth model which we have previously implemented in Unity3D. In particular, the student is asked to ensure that: (1) A stable simulation is provided, (2) creeping is added to the repertoire of plant behaviours, (3) geometric/data structures with small footprints are used, (4) the numbers of interacting swarm grammar agents are kept in check. The Biohybrid Realities project is conducted in close collaboration with our partners from the Universities of Lübeck (Prof. Hamann), Graz (Prof. Schmickl) and the California State University (Prof. Pietroszek). Their feedback during the project work will open great opportunities for the student to present and hone his/her work. Overall, the following steps will ensure a fruitful project: (1) Research on swarm grammars, (2) study of the existing code base, (3) plant biology feedback session, (4) implementation design and realisation, (5) VR case studies, (6) presentation and demo to our partners.

Prerequisites

A background in computer graphics, VR, and Unity3D programming is a great asset for this work.

References

[2] Sebastian von Mammen, Heiko Hamann, and Michael Heider. Robot gardens: an augmented reality prototype for plant-robot biohybrid systems. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Virtual Reality Software and Techno- logy, pages 139–142, München, 2016. ACM.

[3] Sebastian von Mammen and Christian Jacob. The evolution of swarm grammars: Growing trees, crafting art and bottom-up design. IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, 4:10–19, August 2009.

Contact Persons at the University Würzburg