What happened
Roboticist Barbara Mazzolai, associate director for robotics at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, is advocating for a new field of research she calls "sustainability robotics." In a manifesto published in Nature Machine Intelligence in July, she and her collaborators outlined a vision for designing robots meant to improve the relationship between nature, humanity, and technology.
Mazzolai began her career as a biologist, earning a master's degree in biology from the University of Pisa, before a chance opportunity led her to switch to engineering and become an early pioneer of bioinspired robotics. She has developed robots based on octopuses, plant roots, and seeds, drawing on biology's ability to solve a diverse set of problems.
She now argues that engineering needs to reckon with its own impact on the natural world, saying the goal is to reduce the footprint of technology and to think in a different way about robotics and society.
Why it matters
Mazzolai's proposal reframes sustainability as a core component of robot design rather than an afterthought, which suggests a shift in how the field might approach the environmental costs of the technology it builds.
Her own path from biology to engineering illustrates the cross-disciplinary background behind bioinspired robotics, and her argument extends that borrowing from nature into a question of what the technology gives back.
Key facts
Barbara Mazzolai is associate director for robotics at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa and director of the Bioinspired Soft Robotics Laboratory.
She holds a master's degree in biology from the University of Pisa, a master's degree in eco-management and audit schemes from Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, and a Ph.D. in microsystems engineering from the University of Rome Tor Vergata.
She and her collaborators published a manifesto in Nature Machine Intelligence in July outlining a vision for sustainability robotics.
She has developed robots based on octopuses, plant roots, and seeds.
What to watch next
Whether the manifesto's vision gains traction as a distinct research agenda, and how the field responds to treating sustainability as a design requirement rather than an add-on.
How Mazzolai's laboratory and others translate the concept into concrete robot designs, given her stated aim of reducing technology's footprint.
