Scientists use dead spiders and turn them into robots
No, this is not a horror movie. Scientists actually use spider corpses to make robots out of them.
Science stands for nothing. Now again scientists are coming up with innovative solutions. Rice University mechanical engineers have turned spider cadavers into what they call “necrobots,” which can function as mechanical grippers.
Dead spiders turn into robots
Using animal features or components to create robotic systems is not a novelty in research. In bio-inspired approaches, researchers look to an animal’s physical morphology for design ideas and implement them into complex engineering systems. In biohybrid systems, living or active biological materials serve as the basis for a system that requires careful and precise maintenance.
Now the Rice University team has taken science one step further. This by ‘reusing’ dead spiders as mechanical grippers. It’s called ‘necrobotics’. Co-author of the study, Daniel Preston, explains that the team’s lab specializes in soft robotic systems that often use non-traditional materials, as opposed to hard plastics, metals and electronics.
Rode
“The spider falls into this line of research,” he says. “It’s something that hasn’t been used before, but has a lot of potential.” Unlike humans and other mammals that move their limbs by synchronizing opposing muscles, spiders use hydraulics. When they die, they lose the ability to actively pressure their bodies. That’s why they curl up.
They only have flexors, which allow their legs to curl inward, and they extend them outward with hydraulic pressure. Internal valves in the spiders’ hydraulic chamber also allow them to operate each leg individually. The researchers have now found a way to exploit this mechanism. “There are a lot of pick-and-place tasks that we can look at, repetitive tasks like sorting or moving objects on this small scale, and maybe even things like assembling microelectronics,” Preston says.
