Forest intelligence

Plants are connected to each other by an underground network of fungi that provide them with nutrients, help share resources, and extend their sensory area of exploration. This subterranean “social network” has become known as the Wood Wide Web.
Through the Wood Wide Web, the perception of a plant is augmented and the information processing is enhanced at level of the social network with a topology of connections that varies and shows high plasticity and dynamics. The Wood Wide Web largely influences the adaptation of each plant and, at a larger scale, it plays a crucial role in maintaining the health of the ecosystems below and above ground. 

The ground-breaking idea of I-Wood is to study, extract and formalize the rules of the belowground fungus-mediated inter-plant communication (Wood Wide Web) and use this knowledge to develop unprecedented networking strategies for collaborative robotic systems and robot-plant mixed societies.

Mimicking the unique ability of plants to live and operate in social networks, I-Wood will generate new technologies in the field of soft robotics, intelligent systems, and collective robotics, based on solutions that overcome the current animal-based or brain-based model, and will drive the advancement of embodied AI systems in terms of adaptability, robustness, long-term reliability, predictive modelling, and sharing of resources. In I-Wood, from an artificial perspective, ‘Forest Intelligence’ means the augmented perception, adaptation and predictive power of dynamic social networks of individuals having distributed embodied intelligence. The potentialities and feasibility of the proposed approach will be tested in a confined environment where robots will interact with real plants to facilitate the development of the plant-fungus network to promote the healthiness of natural microbioma ecosystem. The results of this case study will have an impact in better understanding the dynamics of the Wood Wide Web and on how protecting natural ecosystems through robotics and AI-based solutions.

The ground-breaking idea of I-Wood is to study, extract and formalize the rules of the belowground fungus-mediated inter-plant communication (Wood Wide Web) and use this knowledge to develop unprecedented networking strategies for collaborative robotic systems and robot-plant mixed societies.

Mimicking the unique ability of plants to live and operate in social networks, I-Wood will generate new technologies in the field of soft robotics, intelligent systems, and collective robotics, based on solutions that overcome the current animal-based or brain-based model, and will drive the advancement of embodied AI systems in terms of adaptability, robustness, long-term reliability, predictive modelling, and sharing of resources. In I-Wood, from an artificial perspective, ‘Forest Intelligence’ means the augmented perception, adaptation and predictive power of dynamic social networks of individuals having distributed embodied intelligence. The potentialities and feasibility of the proposed approach will be tested in a confined environment where robots will interact with real plants to facilitate the development of the plant-fungus network to promote the healthiness of natural microbioma ecosystem. The results of this case study will have an impact in better understanding the dynamics of the Wood Wide Web and on how protecting natural ecosystems through robotics and AI-based solutions.