Meet the Roboticist Pioneering 'Sustainability Robotics'

Barbara Mazzolai didn't set out to become a roboticist. She started as a biologist, drawn to the forests and fungi around her childhood home on Italy's Tuscan coast, and later to marine biology at the University of Pisa. A chance job opportunity in 1999 pulled her into engineering, and she has spent the decades since turning nature's problem-solving into robotic hardware — as reported by IEEE Spectrum in a profile of her career.

Mazzolai is now the associate director for robotics at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa and director of its Bioinspired Soft Robotics Laboratory. Her path there ran through the Italian National Research Council, where she studied how heavy metals like mercury move through soil, water, and living tissue, and through Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, where she joined bioroboticist Paolo Dario's group in 1999 to build environmental-monitoring sensors and robots.

Her first major bioinspired project, developed with Sant'Anna colleagues after she was promoted to assistant professor in 2004, was a soft robot modeled on an octopus. "We proposed it as a paradigm for launching this idea of soft robotics," she says, describing how the machine demonstrated that a soft body could still exert strong forces on its surroundings, much like the animal it copied.

While completing a Ph.D. in microsystems engineering at Tor Vergata University of Rome — finished in 2011, after she'd already joined IIT's Center for Micro-BioRobotics as a team leader in 2009 — Mazzolai became fascinated by plants as models for robots, an idea that initially met skepticism from colleagues who saw plants as static organisms. Her counterargument centers on indeterminate growth: plants grow, sense, communicate, and adapt their form throughout their entire lives.

That insight led to her plant-root-inspired robot. Real roots minimize the energy needed to push through soil by growing only at their very tip while the rest of the structure stays still, unlike a conventional drill that must move its whole body. Mazzolai's team replicated this with a miniaturized 3D printer built into the robot's tip, which feeds heated thermoplastic filament to extend a snakelike body behind it as the tip advances, while onboard sensors detect obstacles, nutrients, and water.

Having spent her career extracting design principles from living systems, Mazzolai now wants robotics to repay the debt. In a manifesto published in Nature Machine Intelligence in July, she and collaborators laid out a vision they call sustainability robotics, built on three pillars: minimizing a robot's environmental impact, making robots accessible across socioeconomic and geographic lines, and designing them to be "symbiotic" — beneficial to both humans and the natural world.

Concretely, that means designing robots with a full life cycle in mind from the start, so that when a machine reaches the end of its useful service it can be reused, recycled, or even biodegraded, rather than following the disposal patterns of technologies like plastics and car batteries that were built without end-of-life planning. Mazzolai argues the pieces needed to make this practical already exist; the challenge is reframing sustainability as a design requirement rather than an afterthought.

She's optimistic that a rising generation of engineers, motivated by growing environmental pressures, will push the idea forward, saying younger researchers increasingly "want to develop something that can help."