A plantoid is a robot or synthetic organism designed to look, act and grow like a plant. The concept was first scientifically published in 2010 (although models of comparable systems controlled by neural networks date back to 2003) and has so far remained largely theoretical. Plantoids imitate plants through appearances and mimicking behaviors and internal processes (which function to keep the plant alive or to ensure its survival). A prototype for the European Commission is now in development by сonsortium of the following scientists: Dario Floreano, Barbara Mazzolai, Josep Samitier, Stefano Mancuso. A plantoid incorporates an inherently distributed architecture consisting of autonomous and specialized modules. Modules can be modeled on plant parts such as the root cap and communicate to form a simple swarm intelligence. This kind of system may display great robustness and resilience. It is conjectured to be capable of energy harvesting and management, collective environmental awareness and many other functions. In science fiction, while human-like robots (androids) are fairly frequent and animal-like biomorphic robots turn up occasionally, plantoids are quite rare. Exceptions occur in the novel Hearts, Hands and Voices (1992, US: The Broken Land) by Ian McDonald and the TV series Jikuu Senshi Spielban. Systems and Processes Like plants, plantoids position its roots and appendages (projecting parts of the plantoid) towards beneficial conditions that stimulate growth (i.e sunlight, ideal temperatures, areas with larger water concentration) and away from factors that bar growth. This occurs through a combination of information from its sensors and the plantoid reacting accordingly. Sensors The use of soft tactical sensors (devices that gather information based on the surrounding physical environment) allows the plantoid to navigate its way through its environment. These sensors relay information to the plantoid and produce signals, similar to how a computer can take in information from a keyboard through input. These sensors scan for obstacles or units of interest (i.e. sources of water) by the roots of the robot, and the programming of the plantoid determine if the object of interest is beneficial or not. With this new information, the plantoid sends signals to other moveable parts of the robot to react accordingly, acting similar to how roots relay information to real plants. Since plantoids do not have a central processing unit, the sensors act as individual command centers, feeding directions for nearby root units to interact with. This can result in multiple sensors picking up the same