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Abstract
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A
significant challenge to modern technologies is to determine how to handle
situations in which they go irreparably wrong, or come to the end of their
productive lives. The convention, since the development of modern civilization,
is to discard a broken item and then procure a new one. In the 20th century
enlightened environmentalists campaigned for recycling and reuse (R and R). R
and R has continued to be an important part of new technology development,
but there is still a huge problem of non-recyclable materials being dumped
into landfill and being discarded in the environment. The challenge is even
greater for robotics, a field which will impact every aspect of our lives,
where discards include motors, rigid elements and toxic power supplies and
batteries. An innovative approach is the biodegradable robot, an active
physical machine composed of biodegradable material, which degrades to
nothing when released into the environment.
Authors
examine the potential and realities of biodegradable robotics, consider novel
solutions to core components such as sensors, actuators and energy
scavenging, and give examples of biodegradable robotics fabricated from every
day, and not so common, biodegradable electroactive materials. The realization
of truly biodegradable robots also brings entirely new deployment,
exploration and bio-remediation capabilities: why track and recover a few
large non-biodegradable robots when you could speculatively release millions
of biodegradable robots instead? Authors consider some of these exciting
developments and explore the future of this new field.
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