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Besides the life-as-it-could-be driver of artificial life research there is also the concept of extending natural life by creating hybrids or mixed societies that are built from both natural and artificial components. In this paper, we motivate and present the research program of the project flora robotica. We present our concepts of control, hardware design, modeling, and human interaction along with preliminary experiments. Our objective is to develop and to investigate closely linked symbiotic relationships between robots and natural plants and to explore the potentials of a plant-robot society able to produce architectural artifacts and living spaces. These robot-plant bio-hybrids create synergies that allow for new functions of plants and robots. They also create novel design opportunities for an architecture that fuses the design and construction phase. The bio-hybrid is an example of mixed societies between 'hard artificial and 'wet natural life, which enables an interaction between natural and artificial ecologies. They form an embodied, selforganizing, and distributed cognitive system which is supposed to grow and develop over long periods of time resulting in the creation of meaningful architectural structures. A key idea is to assign equal roles to robots and plants in order to create a highly integrated, symbiotic system. Besides the gain of knowledge, this project has the objective to create a bio-hybrid system with a defined function and application -growing architectural artifacts.

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Commercial liquid handling robots are rarely appropriate when tasks change often, which is the case in the early stages of biochemical research. In order to address it, we have developed EvoBot, a liquid handling robot, which is open-source and employs a modular design. The combination of an open-source and a modular design is particularly powerful because functionality is divided into modules with simple, well-defined interfaces, hence customisation of modules is possible without detailed knowledge of the entire system. Furthermore, the modular design allows end-users to only produce and assemble the modules that are relevant for their specific application. Hence, time and money are not wasted on functionality that is not needed. Finally, modules can easily be reused. In this paper, we describe the EvoBot modular design and through scientific experiments such as basic liquid handling, nurturing of microbial fuel cells, and droplet chemotaxis experiments document how functionality is increased one module at a time with a significant amount of reuse. In addition to providing wet-labs with an extendible, open-source liquid handling robot, we also think that modularity is a key concept that is likely to be useful in other robots developed for scientific purposes.

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