Robert Full, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, insists biomimicry isn't all about plundering the natural world. He has worked with engineers since the mid-1990s when he helped to develop the crab-inspired Ariel, a minesweeping robot made by iRobot Corp. (famous for its Roomba robotic vacuum) that can look for buried explosives in surf zones. Rather than just aping what nature provides, he says, he encourages designs that "use the advantageous principles and analogies that you find in nature and integrate them with engineering to make something better than nature." Evolution, he says, is not the ultimate engineer; rather, it works on the "good enough" principle—making incremental improvements on previous designs instead of starting from scratch to build better ones.
Last year, Full co-founded the Center for Integrative Biomechanics in Education & Research (CiBER) at U.C. Berkeley to foster mutualism between biologists and engineers: The former provide mechanisms that the latter can use on their devices, which then may serve as models to advance biology. Stickybot, which Full collaborated on with Stanford's Cutkosky, probably best exemplifies that principle.
In 2003 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's advanced research arm, spent several million dollars to commission the building of a robot that could climb walls for surveillance purposes. The result was Spinybot, which could ascend rough surfaces like trees and cement walls with the aid of microclaws tipped with tiny spines, a mechanism borrowed from insects like the cockroach. Stickybot, which debuted in 2006 and can walk up smooth surfaces like windows, uses an adhesive inspired by geckos. On their feet, the lizards have millions of setae—essentially hairs with split ends—that use intermolecular forces to accomplish "directional adhesion": If their setae encounter a surface moving in one direction—say, going left to right—they adhere; when going the opposite direction, they peel off. "It's like Scotch tape that you don't have to press down to stick it," Cutkosky says.
Engineers noted that their climbing robots fell of walls if they didn't have a tail. "We thought [geckos] never use their tail," Full recalls, but it turns out they do. The rear appendage helps the reptiles stabilize themselves and keep their heads from moving back, causing them to fall head over tail to the ground.
Determining that little piece of biophysics, however, required the building of a robot. "That's where biomimetics is moving," Full says. "It's more than cursory and superficial advice on design."
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Add CommentPerhaps we should start robots evolving by teaching them how to breed, sexually, of course, to ensure hybridation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe human body has a proprioceptive nervous system that tells the relative orientation of the bodys truck and limb segments in space. Muscles throughout the body have neuromuscular spindles in them that have an independent motor supply. They can be activated independently of the parent muscle to simulate an action before it is performed and generate propriceptive sensory feedback accordingly. This proprioceptive sensory feedback anticipates a future course of action. It is reconciled with direct sensory input that the body responds to according to prior conditioned responses. These two modes of behaviour, one driven causally from the past and the other anticipating a future together determine our physical actions. It is possible to design a robot that can also anticipate a future course of action and function along the same lines as a human body. See the website article on Robotics at www.cosmic-mindreach.com.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn a more than speculative distant future where robots and androids are everyday phenomena and the symbiosis between man and machine is indistinguishable, the most advanced Android of its time will be created as an Art project by an original Hu who's genetic code remained unmodified by modern science and exemplified by the only true original Human language, Art... The Paranoid Android will be thought mad because it reveals concrete irrational aspects of human and machine life never before brought to light in such manner... A line will be drawn and for the first time in the know history of man or machine, the truth about corporealism will be exposed and the blueprints to the sacred planes of infinite light and bottomless darkness will become the Scientific and Artistic phenomena of the aeons... Or something miming this...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThese points have significant implications and applications to the field of humanoid technologies, in which the signal focus is on building robots that can replicate human actions. In fact, major developments in humanoid robotics in the next several decades will depend upon a fundamental breakthrough in the merging together of biological and electro-mechanical systems to achieve new advances in the replication of human motion and cognition. Other fields such as neurobioengineering and neuromorphic engineering are also closely aligned with the aims of biomimetics and play a crucial role in ongoing research efforts to build sophisticated machines that can mimic human like actions. See http://www.zygbotics.com/2009/04/22/biomimetics-is-the-new-robotics/
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