Nature has inspired scientific creation again, which led to the creation of a flic-flac robot spider. BionicWheelBot in rolling position. (Image via Festo.com)
Japan’s bullet train design came from a bird, the kingfisher while the calla lily flower inspired a water mixer. The bumps on the fin of humpback whales proved to be the reason the fish is so agile when out of water, which therefore inspired a wind turbine. Those examples of biomimicry are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how much scientists take from nature for the designs of machines that make life better for humankind. One of the companies that have been studying the genius in mother nature is the German research company, Festo.
BionicWheelBot, Festo’s new invention, is a robotic duplicate of the flic-flac spider. Discovered around the Sahara Desert, the flic-flac spider is different from other spiders in the way it moves. With its 8 legs, the flic-flac spider can walk and roll. To walk it rotates a set of three legs at a time between the ground and the surroundings. The remaining two legs are tucked away and used to push things away if necessary. The rolling skill of the flic-flac spider is a defense mechanism against predators like the parasitic pompilid wasp which is a vicious predator. To accomplish its escape, the flic-flac uses a combination acrobatics on the ground and the air along with body-projection.
The journey of making a spider-robot started in 2014 when Pr. Ingo Rechenberg, bionics expert from the Technische Universitat of Berlin, made a 9.8 inches long spider-like robot from his observation of the flic-flac spider in Erg Chebbi desert. Since then, the more the research team at Festo studied the rolling spider, the more designs of spider-robot they came up with. Scientists even named the rolling movement of the spider flic-flacking, a term commonly used now in science books and journals. Bec Crew, a writer for Scientific American, simplified the concept by calling the move “cartwheeling” and noticed that it is not specific to the spider since there are a few other animals using the escape technique.
As the experiments continue, the Festo team, working with Pr. Rechenberg, analyzed every aspect of the rolling spider’s moving habits. The result is the development of fifteen motors that are spread inside the body of the BionicWheelBot. In addition, the robot harbors fourteen automatic-locking worm gear units to guarantee that the robot-spider uses energy only when moving its limbs. Regrettably, those gear units don’t provide enough energy for the robot to stay upright when idle. Further observation of the synthetic spider reveals that it moves faster when rolling than walking, as does the original spider. But, to make the robot roll like the natural spider, the research team needed to design limbs in a way that 3 on each side of the body would bend to form a circle, leaving it to the two folded legs to raise the spider’s body off the ground and push it ahead.
All this creativity and team effort will be presented at the best trade show of the industry, the Hannover Messe 2018 Industrial Fair between the 23rd and 27th of April.
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