Imitating the secrets of nature

Written by Thomas Hesselberg

Monday, 27 August 2007

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Imitating the secrets of nature
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Jumping robots is another area of which the group is specialising in. Here the researchers get inspired from insects and other jumping animals and engineers use this knowledge to design jumping robots. It is more serious than it sounds though as such robots are needed by the military which wish to use such robot for recon missions and for perimeters sentinels. They have, though, also more peaceful applications as they can be used to survey inaccessible terrain and large areas, potentially also on other planets. The University of Bath is one of the leading research institutions when it comes to biomimetics. Professor Cliff Burrows, who was the driving force behind opening a biomimetic centre at the mechanical engineering department, has no doubt. “I am convinced that much of the progress in the field of engineering we will see in the coming years will happen across the engineering/biology boundary.

A method with many applications

Velcro under the microscope, showing the tiny hooks which are inspired by the hooks on the burdock seed.

Biomimetic is not a scientific discipline in the traditional sense, but is more a method of transferring biological knowledge into useful new technologies. However, it does not always have to be newly discovered biological knowledge and engineers, therefore, work on some biomimetic projects without the help of biologists. Instead they get inspiration from reading scientific papers from biological journals. However, experience show that a direct cooperation often give better results, because the biologists broader knowledge about the organism or the natural process, usually make it easier to identify the areas worth imitating. However, it is not only engineers which find the biomimetical approach useful. The biomimetic research covers many areas and it is constantly expanding as other interdisciplinary fields realise that the solutions they seek often already exist in nature. This is first and foremost true for biotechnology, but scientists also believe that the biomimetic approach has a large potential in nanotechnology, where the idea is to imitate molecular processes with the aim of designing nano-structures to be used in electronic equipment. Biomimetic researchers, furthermore, develop products and methods that are useful in material science. The most well-known example is the attempt to develop artificial spider silk, but many other composite materials, such as wood and nacre, a hard material covering the shells of bivalves, would be extremely lucrative to produce artificially.

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