Barbara Mazzolai Aims to Build a New Field of Robotics

Throughout her career, roboticist Barbara Mazzolai has drawn inspiration from nature. Now she wants the technology she builds to give back to the environment too. After starting as a biologist, she switched to engineering and became an early pioneer of bioinspired robotics. Drawing on biology's problem-solving abilities, she has developed robots based on octopuses, plant roots, and seeds.

Mazzolai says she has always been fascinated by living organisms and the extraordinary variety of solutions evolution has selected. She is now associate director for robotics at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa. But she also believes engineering must reckon with its impact on the natural world. That conviction led her to advocate for a new field she calls 'sustainability robotics.'

In a July manifesto in Nature Machine Intelligence, Mazzolai and collaborators outlined a vision for designing robots to improve the relationship between nature, humanity, and technology. She argues that researchers need to reduce technology's footprint and think differently to open new possibilities for robotics and society. Sustainability becomes a core design component.

Mazzolai traces her fascination with the living world to her childhood on Italy's Tuscan coast near Livorno. Her father was a public-health inspector and professional mycologist, and the family explored forests and learned about local fungi and plants. After considering art, she enrolled at the University of Pisa in 1987 to study biology, especially marine biology.

Shortly before earning a master's degree in 1995, Mazzolai secured a research position at the Italian National Research Council's Institute of Biophysics. She studied how heavy metals such as mercury cycle through the environment, analyzing samples from water, soil, vegetables, and even humans. She also studied environmental management at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, graduating in 1998.

During that time, the university was recruiting biologists to help design environmental monitoring devices. She got the job in 1999 and began as a research assistant under renowned bioroboticist Paolo Dario. She first developed sensors and then robots to monitor air, water, and soil. In 2004 she was promoted to assistant professor and soon made her first foray into bioinspired robotics. With colleagues at Sant'Anna, she helped design a soft robot inspired by the octopus.