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Page 1 of 4  An artistic impression of a self-moving endoscope in the human intestine. Courtesy of BIOLOCH
This story, allegedly true, illustrates nicely the method which researchers have called biomimetics – an imitation of mechanisms found in nature. Today this process, from studies of nature to the finished technological product, has been formalised and professionalized. Now the process is most often conducted as a collaboration between biologists and engineers in interdisciplinary centres and research groups.
Interdisciplinary centres The Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom has a biomimetic centre. The composition of researchers is typical. The group consists of biologists, engineers and physicists and has even counted geologists and philosophers in the past. Here we will focus on one big European financed project, the BIOLOCH project, which ran from 2002 to 2005, but this line of research is continuing to the present day.
Among other scientists, a biologist worked on the project to investigate functional aspects of the morphology and the locomotory behaviour of the ragworms. The knowledge gathered by the biologist is going to be used by engineers to build a robot worm, which can move in the human intestines. Surgeons want to use such a robot to examine the intestines for diseases. The idea is that this new method of using a self-moving endoscope instead of the traditional rigid endoscopes, will cause considerably less pain and therefore hopefully getting more people to voluntary undertake the intestine examination. This would result in more dangerous intestinal diseases, such as cancer of the colon, being detected in time before it is too late.
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