Fast nastic motion of plants and bio-inspired structures

TL;DR

This paper reviews rapid plant movements and bio-inspired structures, highlighting the mechanisms behind these quick responses and their potential engineering applications like artificial muscles and bioinspired robots.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of fast plant movements and discusses recent biomimetic structures inspired by these mechanisms.

Findings

Fast plant movements occur within seconds despite lack of muscles.

Biomimetic structures inspired by plants can be used in engineering applications.

Understanding plant mechanisms can inform the design of bioinspired devices.

Abstract

The capability to sense and respond to external mechanical stimuli at various timescales is essential to many physiological aspects in plants, including self-protection, intake of nutrients, and reproduction. Remarkably, some plants have evolved the ability to react to mechanical stimuli within a few seconds despite a lack of muscles and nerves. The fast movements of plants in response to mechanical stimuli have long captured the curiosity of scientists and engineers, but the mechanisms behind these rapid thigmonastic movements still are not understood completely. In this article, we provide an overview of such thigmonastic movements in several representative plants, including Dionaea, Utricularia, Aldrovanda, Drosera, and Mimosa. In addition, we review a series of studies that present biomimetic structures inspired by fast moving plants. We hope that this article will shed light on the current status of research on the fast movements of plants and bioinspired structures and also promote interdisciplinary studies on both the fundamental mechanisms of plants' fast movements and biomimetic structures for engineering applications, such as artificial muscles, multi-stable structures, and bioinspired robots.