biomimetics

In addition to slithering, crawling, and flying just about anywhere, what if robots could camouflage themselves? This tentacled prototype can be made to look like -- or stand out from -- its background with a simple injection of dyes.

Developed by engineers at Harvard University's Whitesides Research Group, the "soft machine" silicone quadruped crawls along on pressurized gases fed through an umbilical cord.

Users can send different dyes through channels in the robot's body, allowing it to blend in or stand out in startling fashion, such as glowing in the dark. Color changes take about 30 seconds, but don't require further power to sustain the disguise. … Read more

From snakes to fish to cheetahs, we've seen a veritable Noah's Ark of biomimetic robots in recent years, and now researchers have turned to the lowly earthworm for inspiration.

Meshworm is a squishy, sluglike droid that stretches and squeezes its artificial muscles to move forward. This peristalsis is similar to how worms travel and how your guts move food around. … Read more

Almost a year ago to the day, we wrote about a water-walking microrobot inspired by insects. Now the Jesus bug has ascended over the waves, as it were, at speeds up to 3.6 mph.

Qinmin Pan and colleagues from the Harbin Institute of Technology in China have redesigned their critter so that it jumps up and down like a real water strider, according to research published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

The team wanted to improve the Jesus bug-bot so that its legs would not break the surface of the water when leaping. … Read more

While some people who idolize robots might say the machines walk on water, a new microbot out of China actually does.

The robot was built to imitate the capabilities of water-striding insects such as mosquitoes and water spiders, which can walk and even jump on water without drowning thanks to their highly water-repellent legs. The robot is about 6 inches long and uses 10 water-repellent supporting wire legs and 2 movable, oar-like legs propelled by two mini motors to maneuver like a real water strider. It also looks great in a caterpillar Speedo.

While the new microrobot weighs as much … Read more

Ever notice how some caterpillars can recoil violently when bothered? Researchers at Tufts University are intrigued by this behavior, and have built a lightning-fast robot that replicates it.

GoQBot, described in a study in the journal Bioinspiraton & Biomimetics, emulates the "ballistic rolling" escape tactic employed by some Crambidae caterpillars. The bugs curl into a wheel when threatened and leap to safety.

The recoil happens within 100 milliseconds, which the Tufts researchers led by Huai-Ti Lin, describe as "one of the fastest self-propelled wheeling behaviors in nature."

Exactly how the caterpillars achieve this is a bit … Read more

Japanese researchers are probing the mechanics of insect flight by creating artificial butterflies. The above video shows a wooden contraption gracefully flapping its wings in high-speed footage.

Hiroto Tanaka of Harvard University and Isao Shimoyama of the University of Tokyo made the ornithopter out of balsa wood, polyurethane, and polymer film. It has the same mass and form as a swallowtail butterfly, including the planar shape of its wings.

The wings are powered by a crank mechanism. A rubber band is wound up to make the wings flap vertically at a frequency of 10Hz. It seems to fly for only … Read more

Researchers in California are developing a simple robot cockroach that can be assembled in an hour, move quickly, and survive 92-foot falls.

The Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod, or DASH, is a neat example of the insectile robotics from UC Berkeley's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab.

Robot cockroaches have been designed before, but DASH seems relatively simple to put together before it can be used to creep everyone out.

The 4-inch, 16-gram bug is put together by folding cardboard and polymer sheets. A DC motor runs the six legs while a servomotor bends the frame to induce left or right turns.

It … Read more