Robiotics Lab
Robiotics Lab: Where Robotics Meets Biology
At the Robiotics Lab, we design life-like robots by merging biology with engineering. Drawing from biomimetics, biohybrid systems, and advanced manufacturing, we create soft robotic platforms with unique functional capabilities—enabling them to sense, adapt, and operate in complex environments ranging from deep space to living soils and clinical care settings.
Research Thrusts
Four directions. One lab mission.
Organismal Biophysics: Measuring how animals, plants, and fungi actuate, morph, and sense, then rebuilding that physics in soft machines.
Material Intelligence: Making the material the seat of intelligence, not the substrate it runs on.
Manufacturing Intelligence: The process is the program. How a soft body is made decides what it can do.
Agricultural Soft Robotics: Harvesting and handling crops that rigid robots bruise. Phenotyping internal traits from root to canopy, where imaging cannot go. Robots as instruments for plant biology are tested where the crop grows.
A team working across robotics, materials, manufacturing, and biology.
People
Meet the Robiotics Lab
Our group brings together students and researchers developing soft bioinspired robots, living materials, and robotic manufacturing methods.
Recent and selected work
Publications
Sensor Fusion of Touch & Vision in Soft Manipulators for Fruit Picking
Mishra et al., Nature Communications, 2026
Sensorimotor Control of Robots Mediated by Electrophysiological Measurements of Fungal Mycelia
Mishra et al., Science Robotics, 2024
Making Bioinspired 3D-Printed Autonomic Perspiring Hydrogel Actuators
Mishra et al., Nature Protocols, 2021
News
WVU Today-WVU researcher develops soft and squishy robotic hand for harvesting delicate fruits like strawberries”
Podcast - A fungus-driven robot, counting snow crabs, and a book on climate capitalism
Spotlights - By Graduate School and Next-Gen Professors Program by Cornell University
Robot controlled by a king oyster mushroom blends living organisms and machines
Sweating Robot Beats the Heat
Nerve-like 'optical lace' gives robots a human touch
Worm-like, soil-swimming robots to measure crop underworld