Symbot

SymBot is a term coined by the University of the West of England's Professor John Greenman. It is short for Symbiotic Robot and it refers to the beneficial integration between a live part and an artificial mechatronic part, on a robotic platform.

A SymBot is a robot that can potentially mimic symbiosis, which is obligatory and mutually beneficial. Since one part of this association would be an artefact, it was decided to attribute the term artificial symbiosis to the system. This would come as the result of the integration between the robot and the microbes in the Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs). The microorganisms, as part of their normal activities would be supplying energy to the robot which in turn would be performing various tasks, one of which would be to collect more material from which the microbes may extract energy. This seemed to be the most interesting approach in the pursuit for building an autonomous robot EcoBot-II.