Houseplant gains a machete-wielding robotic arm that she can “control with her plant brain” in a terrifying experiment

A HOUSEPLANT has been armed with a robotic arm in a shocking new experiment.

Robotics artist David Bowen recently created an installation called Plant Machete.

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For the strange science experiment, Bowen installed a robotic arm on a wall-mounted houseplant.

In addition, the artist allowed the plant’s robotic arm to wield a machete.

The point of the installation, Bowen explained, was to see how the plant could act as the brain behind the robotic arm’s movements.

“Essentially, the plant is the brain of the robot that controls the machete and determines how it swings, stabs, slices and interacts in space,” Bowen says website read.

How does it work?

“Plant Machete has a control system that reads and uses the electrical sounds found in a living philodendron,” Bowen explained.

Using an open-source microcontroller, the system can receive electrical signals from the philodendron plant.

In particular, it can read different resistance signals on the leaves of the plant.

“Using custom software, these signals are mapped in real time to the movements of the joints of the industrial robot holding a machete,” the artist’s website explains.

“In this way, the movements of the machete are determined based on inputs from the plant.”

People are skeptical

A report von Futurism noted that there is no evidence “that the philodendron conducts its swordplay in any meaningful way”.

“In reality, signals from the facility are more likely to act as a random number generator to control the robotic arm,” Noor Al-Sibai wrote.

Al-Sibai also pointed out that this is hardly the first time the world has seen what they termed “cyborg botany.”

Still, they called the approach to arming a plant a fresh one, adding that it’s “certainly a fun twist.”