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Robot perception is far from what humans are capable of. Humans do not only have a complex semantic scene understanding but also extract fine-grained intra-object properties for the salient ones. When humans look at plants, they naturally…
Ratcheting surfaces are a common motif in nature and appear in plant awns and grasses. They are known to profer selective advantages for seed dispersion and burial. In two simple model experiments we show that these anisotropically toothed…
We introduce a system of light driven microscopic autonomous moving particles that move on a flat surface. The design is simple, yet effective: Micrometer sized objects with wedge shape are produced by photopolymerization, they are covered…
Foundation models have been successful in natural language processing and computer vision because they are capable of capturing the underlying structures (foundation) of natural languages. However, in medical imaging, the key foundation…
We study how simple eukaryotic organisms make decisions in response to competing stimuli in the context of phototaxis by the unicellular alga $Chlamydomonas~reinhardtii$. While negatively phototactic cells swim directly away from a…
Plants are fundamentally important to life. Key research areas in plant science include plant species identification, weed classification using hyper spectral images, monitoring plant health and tracing leaf growth, and the semantic…
Fruit monitoring plays an important role in crop management, and rising global fruit consumption combined with labor shortages necessitates automated monitoring with robots. However, occlusions from plant foliage often hinder accurate shape…
Understanding how growth induces form is a longstanding biological question. Many studies concentrated on the shapes of plant cells, fungi or bacteria. Some others have shown the importance of the mechanical properties of bacterial walls…
Plants are a paradigm for active shape control in response to stimuli. For instance, it is well-known that a tilted plant will eventually straighten vertically, demonstrating the influence of both an external stimulus, gravity, and an…
Many microorganisms, with phytoplankton and zooplankton as prominent examples, display phototactic behaviour, that is, the ability to perform directed motion within a light gradient. Here we experimentally demonstrate that sensing of light…
We present an approach to match partially occluded plant leaves with databases of full plant leaves. Although contour based 2D shape matching has been studied extensively in the last couple of decades, matching occluded leaves with full…
Leaves shed by deciduous trees contain 40\% of the annually sequestered carbon, and include nutrients vital to the expansion and health of forest ecosystems. To achieve this, leaves must fall quickly to land near the parent tree --…
Quantifying organism-level phenotypes, such as growth dynamics and biomass accumulation, is fundamental to understanding agronomic traits and optimizing crop production. However, quality growing data of plants at scale is difficult to…
Plants solve complex problems without centralized control, relying instead on growth-driven dynamics to sense, navigate, and optimize resource acquisition. This review presents a unified physical framework for understanding plant behavior…
Autonomous agriculture applications (e.g., inspection, phenotyping, plucking fruits) require manipulating the plant foliage to look behind the leaves and the branches. Partial visibility, extreme clutter, thin structures, and unknown…
Flexible plants, fungi, and sessile animals are thought to reconfigure in the wind and water to reduce the drag forces that act upon them. In strong winds, for example, leaves roll up into cone shapes that reduce flutter and drag when…
The spongy mesophyll is a complex, porous tissue found in plant leaves that enables carbon capture and provides mechanical stability. Unlike many other biological tissues, which remain confluent throughout development, the spongy mesophyll…
The opacity of typical objects in the world results in occlusion --- an important property of natural scenes that makes inference of the full 3-dimensional structure of the world challenging. The relationship between occlusion and low-level…
The process of self-assembly is guided by the minimization of free energy, which limits the symmetries available for assembly and ultimately the usefulness of devices fabricated in this fashion. Here, we demonstrate experimentally for the…
Graphene is well known to grow as flat sheets aligned with the growth substrate. Oriented graphene structures typically normal to the substrate have recently gained major attention. Most often, normal orientation is achieved in…