Winter School on Smart Materials for Soft Robots

During the workshop, students will build a biohybrid wind energy harvester based on a living plant and flexible soft electrodes generating electricity from leaves’ motion created by wind. Students will be assessing different materials and electrodes shapes and as a result learn how plants and their natural materials can integrate into a biohybrid device for producing electricity. The students will also learn about the triboelectric effect, how different materials influence it and how it occurs in plants. The final challenge is to create a simple circuit to harvest the energy and power as much LEDs as possible. Moreover, students will learn how to record the tiny electrophysiological signals that plant cells produce to communicate using the carnivorous Venus flytraps.