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Wednesday, December 8, 2021

Bionic architecture

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bionic_architecture

Bionic architecture is a contemporary movement that studies the physiological, behavioural, and structural adaptions of biological organisms as a source of inspiration for designing and constructing expressive buildings. These structures are designed to be self-sufficient, being able to structurally modify themselves in response to the fluctuating internal and external forces such as changes in weather and temperature.

Although this style of architecture has existed since the early 18th century period, the movement only began to mature in the early 21st century, following society's growing concerns over climate change and global warming. These influences led to bionic architecture being used to draw society away from its anthropocentric environment, by creating landscapes that allow for the harmonious relationship between nature and society. This is achieved through having an in-depth understanding of the complex interactions between form, material, and structure in order to ensure that the building's design supports a more sustainable environment. As a result, architects will rely upon the use of high-tech, artificial materials and techniques in order to conserve energy and materials, lower the consumption of construction and increase the practicality and reliability of their building structures.

History and theoretical framework

The word ‘bionic architecture’ is derived from the Greek word ‘bios’ (life) as well as the English word ‘technics’ (to study). The term was originally used to describe the scientific trend of ‘transferring technologies into life-forms’. The term ‘bionic’ was first used in 1958 by U.S army colonel, Jack E. Steele and Soviet scientist, Otto Schmitt during an astronomer project that focused on research surrounding the field of robotics. In their project, both researchers initially recognised the concept of bionics as ‘the science of systems based on living creatures’. The idea was then expanded upon in 1997 by Janine Benyus, who coined the term ‘bio mimicry’ which referred to ‘the conscious emulation of nature’s genius'.

In 1974, Victor Glushkov published his book The Encyclopedia of Cybernetics, in which the study of bionics was applied to architectural thinking, and claimed that: "In recent years, another new scientific direction has emerged in which bionics collaborates with architecture and building technics, namely architectural bionics. Using models of nature as samples, such as plant stems, living leaf nerve, eggshells, engineers create durable and beautiful architectural structures: houses, bridges, movie theatres, etc."[citation needed] Later, J.S Lebedev published his book, Architecture and Bionic in 1983 and focused on the classical theory of architecture. It explored the possibility of studying the behaviours of different biological life forms and integrating these observations into building and design. He also theorised that bionic architecture would solve many problems associated with design and construction because it would allow for the ‘perfect protection’ through mimicking the same survival mechanisms used by organisms. By the late 1980s, architectural bionics finally emerged as a new branch of architectural science and practice. This then influenced the creation of the Central Research and Experimental Design Laboratory of Architectural Bionics, which became the main research centre for the field of bionic architecture in the USSR and a number of socialist countries.

Purpose

The built environment contributes to a majority of waste, material production, energy use and fossil fuel emissions. Thus, there is a responsibility to develop a more efficient and ecologically friendly construction design that still allows for daily activities in society to take place. This is achieved through the use of renewable energy sources such as solar power, wind energy, hydro power, and natural sources such as wood, soil and minerals.

In her book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (1997), Janine Benyus formulated a set of questions that can be used to establish the level of bio mimicry within an architectural design. In order to ensure that an architectural design follows the principles of bionics, the answer must be ‘yes’ to the following questions:

  • Does its precedent relate to nature?
  • Is it solar-powered?
  • Is it self-sufficient?
  • Does it fit form to function?
  • Is it sustainable?
  • Is it beautiful?

Styles of bionic architecture

The classifications of bionic architecture are:

  • Arch form structure: inspired by an animal's spinal column, thereby creating a more stiff and rigid building.
  • Thin shell structure: inspired by various crustaceans and skulls due to its ability to distribute internal force across its surface area. Buildings that employ this style are malleable and flexible.
  • Puffing structure: inspired by plant and animal cells. It is mainly used for aesthetic purposes.
  • Spiral structure: inspired by plantain leaves and its ability to regulate sunlight. Buildings with this design have the most abundant sunlight.

Historical evolution

A piece of the Corinthian column capital which is decorated with acanthus leaves

Pre-18th Century Period

Archaeological data suggests that the first forms of bionic architecture can be traced back to ancient Greece and was primarily focused upon anatomical observations. This is because the Greeks were fascinated by the features of the human body, which influenced the symmetrical design of their architecture. Bionic architecture can also be observed through their use of plant elements within their stucco mouldings. This idea was said to have originated from one of Polykleitos’ students, who observed the acanthus leaves decorated on a Corinthian grave. This provided inspiration for the Corinthian column capital’s design, which was surrounded by an acanthus foliage.

18th  – 19th Century Period

The ceiling of the 'Sagrada Familia', with patterns that mirror the shapes of flowers
 
'The Eden Project', which has solar-powered domes

Following the rise of the Industrial Revolution, many theorists became concerned with the underlying implications of modern, technological advancements and thus, re-explored the idea of ‘nature-centred architecture’. Most bionic architectures built during this era can be seen drawing away from the common iron construction and instead, exploring more futuristic styles. For example, Antonio Gaudi's Sagrada Familia’s interior design drew its inspiration from various shapes and patterns of plants while its pillars mirrored the structure of human bones. Such influences were based on Gaudi's realisation of the potential for mimicking nature in order to enhance the functionality of his buildings. Joseph Paxton's, Crystal Palace also uses lattice grids in order to mimic the human bone structure and thus, create a more rigid structure. The Crystal Palace has also imitated the vein tissues found in water lilies and the human thighbone. This reduced the building's surface tension, thereby allowing it to carry more weight without the use of an excessive amount of materials.

20th – 21st century period

Due to growing concerns surrounding global warming and climate change, as well as the rise of technological improvements, architectural bionics became primarily focused on more efficient ways to achieve modern sustainability. An example of the modern architectural bionic movement includes the 30 St Mary Axe (2003), which is heavily inspired by the 'Venus Flower Basket Sponge', a sea creature with a lattice-like exoskeleton and round shape that disperses force from water currents. The building's design features an aluminium coated steel diagrid structure. This allows for passive cooling, heating, ventilating and lighting. Nicholas Grimshaw's, The Eden Project (2001) features a set of natural biomes with several geodesic domes inspired by bubbles joined together. These are made of three layers of Ethylene Tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE), a form of plastic that provides a lighter steel frame and allows for more sunlight to enter the building in order to generate solar power. Its pillows are also built to be easily detachable from its steel frame should more efficient material be discovered in the future.

Evaluation

The BIQ House located in Hamburg, Germany
 
The Sahara Forest Project in development

Advantages

The main advantage of bionic architecture is that it allows for a more sustainable living environment through its reliance upon using renewable materials. This allows for an increase in monetary savings due to the increased energy efficiency. For example:

  • The BIQ (Bio-Intelligent Quotient) House in Germany was designed by Splitterwerk Architects and SSC Strategic Science Consultants. It is completely powered by algae. It features a heat exchanger which cultivates micro algae within its glass panels in order to be used as a resource for providing the building with energy and warmth. This produces zero carbon electricity, which is twice as effective as photovoltaics.
  • The Sahara Forest Project in Tunisia is a greenhouse project that is heavily inspired by the Namibian fog-basking beetle, which can regulate its body temperature and develop its own fresh water in arid climates. Like the beetle, this building features a saltwater evaporating, cooling and humidifying system that is suitable for year-round cultivation. The evaporated air condenses to fresh water, allowing the greenhouse to remain heated at night.. The salt extracted from the evaporation process can also be crystallised into calcium carbonate and sodium chloride, which can be compressed into building blocks, thereby minimising waste.

Disadvantages

Bionic architecture has been heavily criticised for being difficult to maintain due to its tendency to be overly technical. For example:

  • The East Gate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe had to follow a strict set of rules during its creation. Its engineers claimed that the outer walls must not be under direct sunlight, the window to wall ratio must be approximately 25% and the windows must be sealed with ventilation, in order to combat noise pollution and unpredictable weather.

Future use

With the rise of technological advancements, the full potential of Bionic Architecture is still being explored. However, due to the rapidly growing demand for a more effective, ecologically sustainable design approach that does not compromise the needs of society, many ideas have been put forth:

Ocean Scraper 2050

This essentially involves creating floating buildings inspired by the buoyancy of icebergs and the shapes of various organisms. In particular, its internal structure will be based on the shape of beehives and micropal-radiolares in order to house different residential and office spaces. Its proposed design allows for the building to be self-sufficient and sustainable as it will aim to generate energy from various sources such as wind, biomass, solar energy, hydro energy and geothermal energy. Moreover, as the ocean scraper is intended to be built on water, its designers are exploring the idea of extracting and generating electricity from new sources such as under-water volcanoes and earthquake power.

Supercentre Beehive Concept

This idea explores the possibility of creating an area that requires less travel time between places, thereby reducing the amount of fossil fuel emissions and CO2 pollution. As this design is meant for sites that are ‘already a large hub for activity’, it will particularly be useful for high schools, colleges and grocery stores. The architectural design is also very compact and aims to increase the amount of green area, thereby allowing for the full advantage of space.

Pod Housing Units

This idea focuses upon creating a set of interconnected living units that ‘can be networked together in order to share and benefit from one another’s utilities’. The design is also intended to be self-sustaining and can be changed based on the needs of the user. For example, the roof can be modified to be slanted in order to collect solar energy, pitched to collect rainwater, or smoothed in order to allow for better airflow.

 

Cloud robotics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cloud robotics is a field of robotics that attempts to invoke cloud technologies such as cloud computing, cloud storage, and other Internet technologies centered on the benefits of converged infrastructure and shared services for robotics. When connected to the cloud, robots can benefit from the powerful computation, storage, and communication resources of modern data center in the cloud, which can process and share information from various robots or agent (other machines, smart objects, humans, etc.). Humans can also delegate tasks to robots remotely through networks. Cloud computing technologies enable robot systems to be endowed with powerful capability whilst reducing costs through cloud technologies. Thus, it is possible to build lightweight, low-cost, smarter robots with an intelligent "brain" in the cloud. The "brain" consists of data center, knowledge base, task planners, deep learning, information processing, environment models, communication support, etc.

Components

A cloud for robots potentially has at least six significant components:

  • Offering a global library of images, maps, and object data, often with geometry and mechanical properties, expert system, knowledge base (i.e. semantic web, data centres);
  • Massively-parallel computation on demand for sample-based statistical modelling and motion planning, task planning, multi-robot collaboration, scheduling and coordination of system;
  • Robot sharing of outcomes, trajectories, and dynamic control policies and robot learning support;
  • Human sharing of "open-source" code, data, and designs for programming, experimentation, and hardware construction;
  • On-demand human guidance and assistance for evaluation, learning, and error recovery;
  • Augmented human–robot interaction through various way (Semantics knowledge base, Apple SIRI like service etc.).

Applications

Autonomous mobile robots
Google's self-driving cars are cloud robots. The cars use the network to access Google's enormous database of maps and satellite and environment model (like Streetview) and combines it with streaming data from GPS, cameras, and 3D sensors to monitor its own position within centimetres, and with past and current traffic patterns to avoid collisions. Each car can learn something about environments, roads, or driving, or conditions, and it sends the information to the Google cloud, where it can be used to improve the performance of other cars.
Cloud medical robots
a medical cloud (also called a healthcare cluster) consists of various services such as a disease archive, electronic medical records, a patient health management system, practice services, analytics services, clinic solutions, expert systems, etc. A robot can connect to the cloud to provide clinical service to patients, as well as deliver assistance to doctors (e.g. a co-surgery robot). Moreover, it also provides a collaboration service by sharing information between doctors and care givers about clinical treatment.
Assistive robots
A domestic robot can be employed for healthcare and life monitoring for elderly people. The system collects the health status of users and exchange information with cloud expert system or doctors to facilitate elderly peoples life, especially for those with chronic diseases. For example, the robots are able to provide support to prevent the elderly from falling down, emergency healthy support such as heart disease, blooding disease. Care givers of elderly people can also get notification when in emergency from the robot through network.
Industrial robots
As highlighted by the German government's Industry 4.0 Plan, "Industry is on the threshold of the fourth industrial revolution. Driven by the Internet, the real and virtual worlds are growing closer and closer together to form the Internet of Things. Industrial production of the future will be characterised by the strong individualisation of products under the conditions of highly flexible (large series) production, the extensive integration of customers and business partners in business and value-added processes, and the linking of production and high-quality services leading to so-called hybrid products." In manufacturing, such cloud based robot systems could learn to handle tasks such as threading wires or cables, or aligning gaskets from a professional knowledge base. A group of robots can share information for some collaborative tasks. Even more, a consumer is able to place customised product orders to manufacturing robots directly with online ordering systems. Another potential paradigm is shopping-delivery robot systems. Once an order is placed, a warehouse robot dispatches the item to an autonomous car or autonomous drone to deliver it to its recipient.

Research

RoboEarth  was funded by the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development projects, specifically to explore the field of cloud robotics. The goal of RoboEarth is to allow robotic systems to benefit from the experience of other robots, paving the way for rapid advances in machine cognition and behaviour, and ultimately, for more subtle and sophisticated human-machine interaction. RoboEarth offers a Cloud Robotics infrastructure. RoboEarth’s World-Wide-Web style database stores knowledge generated by humans – and robots – in a machine-readable format. Data stored in the RoboEarth knowledge base include software components, maps for navigation (e.g., object locations, world models), task knowledge (e.g., action recipes, manipulation strategies), and object recognition models (e.g., images, object models). The RoboEarth Cloud Engine includes support for mobile robots, autonomous vehicles, and drones, which require much computation for navigation.

Rapyuta  is an open source cloud robotics framework based on RoboEarth Engine developed by the robotics researcher at ETHZ. Within the framework, each robot connected to Rapyuta can have a secured computing environment (rectangular boxes) giving them the ability to move their heavy computation into the cloud. In addition, the computing environments are tightly interconnected with each other and have a high bandwidth connection to the RoboEarth knowledge repository.

KnowRob  is an extensional project of RoboEarth. It is a knowledge processing system that combines knowledge representation and reasoning methods with techniques for acquiring knowledge and for grounding the knowledge in a physical system and can serve as a common semantic framework for integrating information from different sources.

RoboBrain  is a large-scale computational system that learns from publicly available Internet resources, computer simulations, and real-life robot trials. It accumulates everything robotics into a comprehensive and interconnected knowledge base. Applications include prototyping for robotics research, household robots, and self-driving cars. The goal is as direct as the project's name—to create a centralised, always-online brain for robots to tap into. The project is dominated by Stanford University and Cornell University. And the project is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office, Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Robotics Initiative, whose goal is to advance robotics to help make the United States more competitive in the world economy.

MyRobots is a service for connecting robots and intelligent devices to the Internet. It can be regarded as a social network for robots and smart objects (i.e. Facebook for robots). With socialising, collaborating and sharing, robots can benefit from those interactions too by sharing their sensor information giving insight on their perspective of their current state.

COALAS  is funded by the INTERREG IVA France (Channel) – England European cross-border co-operation programme. The project aims to develop new technologies for handicapped people through social and technological innovation and through the users' social and psychological integrity. Objectives is to produce a cognitive ambient assistive living system with Healthcare cluster in cloud with domestic service robots like humanoid, intelligent wheelchair which connect with the cloud.

ROS (Robot Operating System) provides an eco-system to support cloud robotics. ROS is a flexible and distributed framework for robot software development. It is a collection of tools, libraries, and conventions that aim to simplify the task of creating complex and robust robot behaviour across a wide variety of robotic platforms. A library for ROS that is a pure Java implementation, called rosjava, allows Android applications to be developed for robots. Since Android has a booming market and billion users, it would be significant in the field of Cloud Robotics.

DAVinci Project is a proposed software framework that seeks to explore the possibilities of parallelizing some of the robotics algorithms as Map/Reduce tasks in Hadoop. The project aims to build a cloud computing environment capable of providing a compute cluster built with commodity hardware exposing a suite of robotic algorithms as a SaaS and share data co-operatively across the robotic ecosystem. This initiative is not available publicly.

C2RO (C2RO Cloud Robotics) is a platform that processes real-time applications such as collision avoidance and object recognition in the cloud. Previously, high latency times prevented these applications from being processed in the cloud thus requiring on-system computational hardware (e.g. Graphics Processing Unit or GPU). C2RO published a peer-reviewed paper at IEEE PIMRC17 showing its platform could make autonomous navigation and other AI services available on robots- even those with limited computational hardware (e.g. a Raspberry Pi)- from the cloud. C2RO eventually claimed to be the first platform to demonstrate cloud-based SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) at RoboBusiness in September 2017.

Noos is a cloud robotics service, providing centralised intelligence to robots that are connected to it. The service went live in December 2017. By using the Noos-API, developers could access services for computer vision, deep learning, and SLAM. Noos was developed and maintained by Ortelio Ltd.

Rocos is a centralized cloud robotics platform that provides the developer tooling and infrastructure to build, test, deploy, operate and automate robot fleets at scale. Founded in October 2017, the platform went live in January 2019.

Limitations of cloud robotics

Though robots can benefit from various advantages of cloud computing, cloud is not the solution to all of robotics.

  • Controlling a robot’s motion which relies heavily on (real-time) sensors and feedback of controller may not benefit much from the cloud.
  • Tasks that involve real-time execution require on-board processing.
  • Cloud-based applications can get slow or unavailable due to high-latency responses or network hitch. If a robot relies too much on the cloud, a fault in the network could leave it “brainless.”

Challenges

The research and development of cloud robotics has following potential issues and challenges:

Risks

  • Environmental security - The concentration of computing resources and users in a cloud computing environment also represents a concentration of security threats. Because of their size and significance, cloud environments are often targeted by virtual machines and bot malware, brute force attacks, and other attacks.
  • Data privacy and security - Hosting confidential data with cloud service providers involves the transfer of a considerable amount of an organisation's control over data security to the provider. For example, every cloud contains a huge information from the clients include personal data. If a household robot is hacked, users could have risk of their personal privacy and security, like house layout, life snapshot, home-view, etc. It may be accessed and leaked to the world around by criminals. Another problems is once a robot is hacked and controlled by someone else, which may put the user in danger.
  • Ethical problems - Some ethics of robotics, especially for cloud based robotics must be considered. Since a robot is connected via networks, it has risk to be accessed by other people. If a robot is out of control and carries out illegal activities, who should be responsible for it.

History

The term "Cloud Robotics" first appeared in the public lexicon as part of a talk given by James Kuffner in 2010 at the IEEE/RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robotics entitled "Cloud-enabled Robots".  Since then, "Cloud Robotics" has become a general term encompassing the concepts of information sharing, distributed intelligence, and fleet learning that is possible via networked robots and modern cloud computing. Kuffner was part of Google when he delivered his presentation and the technology company has teased its various cloud robotics initiatives until 2019 when it launched the Google Cloud Robotics Platform for developers.

From the early days of robot development, it was common to have computation done on a computer that was separated from the actual robot mechanism, but connected by wires for power and control. As wireless communication technology developed, new forms of experimental "remote brain" robots were developed controlled by small, onboard compute resources for robot control and safety, that were wirelessly connected to a more powerful remote computer for heavy processing. 

The term "cloud computing" was popularized with the launch of Amazon EC2 in 2006. It marked the availability of high-capacity networks, low-cost computers and storage devices as well as the widespread adoption of hardware virtualization and service-oriented architecture. In a correspondence with Popular Science in July 2006, Kuffner wrote that after a robot was programmed or successfully learned to perform a task it could share its model and relevant data with all other cloud-connected robots: 

"...the robot could then 'publish' its refined model to some website or universal repository of knowledge that all future robots could download and utilize. My vision is to have a 'robot knowledge database' that will over time improve the capabilities of all future robotic systems. It would serve as a warehouse of information and statistics about the physical world that robots can access and use to improve their reasoning about the consequences of possible actions and make better action plans in terms of accuracy, safety, and robustness. It could also serve as a kind of 'skill library'. For example, if I successfully programmed my butler robot how to cook a perfect omelette, I could 'upload' the software for omelette cooking to a server that all robots could then download whenever they were asked to cook an omelette. There could be a whole community of robot users uploading skill programs, much like the current 'shareware' and 'freeware' software models that are popular for PC users."

— James Kuffner, (July 2006)

Some publications and events related to Cloud Robotics (in chronological order):

  • The IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Internet and Online Robots was founded by Ken Goldberg and Roland Siegwart et al. in May 2001. The committee then expanded to IEEE Society of Robotics and Automation's Technical Committee on Networked Robots in 2004.
  • James J. Kuffner, a former CMU robotics professor, and research scientist at Google, now CEO of Toyota Research Institute—Advanced Development, spoke on cloud robotics in IEEE/RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robotics 2010. It describes "a new approach to robotics that takes advantage of the Internet as a resource for massively parallel computation and sharing of vast data resources."
  • Ryan Hickman, a Google Product Manager, led an internal volunteer effort in 2010 to connect robots with the Google's cloud services. This work was later expanded to include open source ROS support and was demonstrated on stage by Ryan Hickman, Damon Kohler, Brian Gerkey, and Ken Conley at Google I/O 2011.
  • National Robotics Initiative of US announced in 2011 aimed to explore how robots can enhance the work of humans rather than replacing them. It claims that next generation of robots are more aware than oblivious, more social than solitary.
  • NRI Workshop on Cloud Robotics: Challenges and Opportunities- February 2013.
  • A Roadmap for U.S. Robotics From Internet to Robotics 2013 Edition- by Georgia Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Technology Consortium, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, Stanford University, University of California–Berkeley, University of Washington, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyUS and Robotics OA US. The Roadmap highlighted “Cloud” Robotics and Automation for Manufacturing in the future years.
  • Cloud-Based Robot Grasping with the Google Object Recognition Engine.
  • 2013 IEEE IROS Workshop on Cloud Robotics. Tokyo. November 2013.
  • Cloud Robotics-Enable cloud computing for robots. The author proposed some paradigms of using cloud computing in robotics. Some potential field and challenges were coined. R. Li 2014.
  • Special Issue on Cloud Robotics and Automation- A special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, April 2015.
  • Robot APP Store Robot Applications in Cloud, provide applications for robot just like computer/phone app.
  • DARPA Cloud Robotics.
  • The first industrial cloud robotics platform, Tend, was founded by Mark Silliman, James Gentes and Robert Kieffer in February 2017. Tend allows robots to be remotely controlled and monitored via websockets and NodeJs.
  • Cloud robotic architectures: directions for future research from a comparative analysis.

Bionics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Robot behaviour (bottom) modeled after that of a cockroach (top) and a gecko (middle).

Bionics or biologically inspired engineering is the application of biological methods and systems found in nature to the study and design of engineering systems and modern technology.

The word bionic, coined by Jack E. Steele in August 1958, is a portmanteau from biology and electronics that was popularized by the 1970s U.S. television series The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, both based upon the novel Cyborg by Martin Caidin. All three stories feature humans given various superhuman powers by their electromechanical implants.

According to proponents of bionic technology, the transfer of technology between lifeforms and manufactured objects is desirable because evolutionary pressure typically forces living organisms--fauna and flora--to become optimized and efficient. For example, dirt- and water-repellent paint (coating) developed from the observation that practically nothing sticks to the surface of the lotus flower plant (the lotus effect).

The term "biomimetic" is preferred for references to chemical reactions, such as reactions that, in nature, involve biological macromolecules (e.g., enzymes or nucleic acids) whose chemistry can be replicated in vitro using much smaller molecules.

Examples of bionics in engineering include the hulls of boats imitating the thick skin of dolphins; sonar, radar, and medical ultrasound imaging imitating animal echolocation.

In the field of computer science, the study of bionics has produced artificial neurons, artificial neural networks, and swarm intelligence. Evolutionary computation was also motivated by bionics ideas but it took the idea further by simulating evolution in silico and producing well-optimized solutions that had never appeared in nature.

It is estimated by Julian Vincent, professor of biomimetics at the University of Bath's Department of Mechanical Engineering, that "at present there is only a 12% overlap between biology and technology in terms of the mechanisms used".

History

The name "biomimetics" was coined by Otto Schmitt in the 1950s. The term "bionics" was coined by Jack E. Steele in August 1958 while working at the Aeronautics Division House at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. However, terms like biomimicry or biomimetics are more preferred in the technology world in efforts to avoid confusion between the medical term "bionics." Coincidentally, Martin Caidin used the word for his 1972 novel Cyborg, which inspired the series The Six Million Dollar Man. Caidin was a long-time aviation industry writer before turning to fiction full-time.

Methods

Velcro was inspired by the tiny hooks found on the surface of burs.

The study of bionics often emphasizes implementing a function found in nature rather than imitating biological structures. For example, in computer science, cybernetics tries to model the feedback and control mechanisms that are inherent in intelligent behavior, while artificial intelligence tries to model the intelligent function regardless of the particular way it can be achieved.

The conscious copying of examples and mechanisms from natural organisms and ecologies is a form of applied case-based reasoning, treating nature itself as a database of solutions that already work. Proponents argue that the selective pressure placed on all natural life forms minimizes and removes failures.

Although almost all engineering could be said to be a form of biomimicry, the modern origins of this field are usually attributed to Buckminster Fuller and its later codification as a house or field of study to Janine Benyus.

There are generally three biological levels in the fauna or flora, after which technology can be modeled:

Examples

  • In robotics, bionics and biomimetics are used to apply the way animals move to the design of robots. BionicKangaroo was based on the movements and physiology of kangaroos.
  • Velcro is the most famous example of biomimetics. In 1948, the Swiss engineer George de Mestral was cleaning his dog of burrs picked up on a walk when he realized how the hooks of the burrs clung to the fur.
  • The horn-shaped, saw-tooth design for lumberjack blades used at the turn of the 19th century to cut down trees when it was still done by hand was modeled after observations of a wood-burrowing beetle. It revolutionized the industry because the blades worked so much faster at felling trees.
  • Cat's eye reflectors were invented by Percy Shaw in 1935 after studying the mechanism of cat eyes. He had found that cats had a system of reflecting cells, known as tapetum lucidum, which was capable of reflecting the tiniest bit of light.
  • Leonardo da Vinci's flying machines and ships are early examples of drawing from nature in engineering.
  • Resilin is a replacement for rubber that has been created by studying the material also found in arthropods.
  • Julian Vincent drew from the study of pinecones when he developed in 2004 "smart" clothing that adapts to changing temperatures. "I wanted a nonliving system which would respond to changes in moisture by changing shape", he said. "There are several such systems in plants, but most are very small – the pinecone is the largest and therefore the easiest to work on". Pinecones respond to higher humidity by opening their scales (to disperse their seeds). The "smart" fabric does the same thing, opening up when the wearer is warm and sweating, and shutting tight when cold.
  • "Morphing aircraft wings" that change shape according to the speed and duration of flight were designed in 2004 by biomimetic scientists from Penn State University. The morphing wings were inspired by different bird species that have differently shaped wings according to the speed at which they fly. In order to change the shape and underlying structure of the aircraft wings, the researchers needed to make the overlying skin also be able to change, which their design does by covering the wings with fish-inspired scales that could slide over each other. In some respects this is a refinement of the swing-wing design.
Lotus leaf surface, rendered: microscopic view
  • Some paints and roof tiles have been engineered to be self-cleaning by copying the mechanism from the Nelumbo lotus.
  • Cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) are the thin-film material often used to fabricate fish tank thermometers or mood rings, that change color with temperature changes. They change color because their molecules are arranged in a helical or chiral arrangement and with temperature the pitch of that helical structure changes, reflecting different wavelengths of light. Chiral Photonics, Inc. has abstracted the self-assembled structure of the organic CLCs to produce analogous optical devices using tiny lengths of inorganic, twisted glass fiber.
  • Nanostructures and physical mechanisms that produce the shining color of butterfly wings were reproduced in silico by Greg Parker, professor of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton and research student Luca Plattner in the field of photonics, which is electronics using photons as the information carrier instead of electrons.
  • The wing structure of the blue morpho butterfly was studied and the way it reflects light was mimicked to create an RFID tag that can be read through water and on metal.
  • The wing structure of butterflies has also inspired the creation of new nanosensors to detect explosives.
  • Neuromorphic chips, silicon retinae or cochleae, has wiring that is modelled after real neural networks. S.a.: connectivity.
  • Technoecosystems or 'EcoCyborg' systems involve the coupling of natural ecological processes to technological ones which mimic ecological functions. This results in the creation of a self-regulating hybrid system. Research into this field was initiated by Howard T. Odum, who perceived the structure and emergy dynamics of ecosystems as being analogous to energy flow between components of an electrical circuit.
  • Medical adhesives involving glue and tiny nano-hairs are being developed based on the physical structures found in the feet of geckos.
  • Computer viruses also show similarities with biological viruses in their way to curb program-oriented information towards self-reproduction and dissemination.
  • The cooling system of the Eastgate Centre building in Harare was modeled after a termite mound to achieve very efficient passive cooling.
  • Adhesive which allows mussels to stick to rocks, piers and boat hulls inspired bioadhesive gel for blood vessels.
  • Through the field of bionics, new aircraft designs with far greater agility and other advantages may be created. This has been described by Geoff Spedding and Anders Hedenström in an article in Journal of Experimental Biology. Similar statements were also made by John Videler and Eize Stamhuis in their book Avian Flight and in the article they present in Science about LEVs. John Videler and Eize Stamhuis have since worked out real-life improvements to airplane wings, using bionics research. This research in bionics may also be used to create more efficient helicopters or miniature UAVs. This latter was stated by Bret Tobalske in an article in Science about Hummingbirds. Bret Tobalske has thus now started work on creating these miniature UAVs which may be used for espionage. UC Berkeley as well as ESA have finally also been working in a similar direction and created the Robofly (a miniature UAV) and the Entomopter (a UAV which can walk, crawl and fly).
  • A bio-inspired mechanical device can generate plasma in water via cavitation using the morphological accurate snapping shrimp claw. This was described in detail by Xin Tang and David Staack in an article published in Science Advances.

Specific uses of the term

Induced sensorimotor brain plasticity controls pain in phantom limb patients-ncomms13209-s2

In medicine

Bionics refers to the flow of concepts from biology to engineering and vice versa. Hence, there are two slightly different points of view regarding the meaning of the word.

In medicine, bionics means the replacement or enhancement of organs or other body parts by mechanical versions. Bionic implants differ from mere prostheses by mimicking the original function very closely, or even surpassing it.

Bionics' German equivalent, Bionik, always adheres to the broader meaning, in that it tries to develop engineering solutions from biological models. This approach is motivated by the fact that biological solutions will usually be optimized by evolutionary forces.

While the technologies that make bionic implants possible are developing gradually, a few successful bionic devices exist, a well known one being the Australian-invented multi-channel cochlear implant (bionic ear), a device for deaf people. Since the bionic ear, many bionic devices have emerged and work is progressing on bionics solutions for other sensory disorders (e.g. vision and balance). Bionic research has recently provided treatments for medical problems such as neurological and psychiatric conditions, for example Parkinson's disease and epilepsy.

In 1997, the Colombian Prof. Alvaro Rios Poveda, a researcher in bionics in Latin America, developed an upper limb and hand prosthesis with sensory feedback. This technology allows amputee patients to handle prosthetic hand systems in a more natural way 

By 2004 fully functional artificial hearts were developed. Significant progress is expected with the advent of nanotechnology. A well-known example of a proposed nanodevice is a respirocyte, an artificial red cell, designed (though not built yet) by Robert Freitas.

Kwabena Boahen from Ghana was a professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. During his eight years at Penn, he developed a silicon retina that was able to process images in the same manner as a living retina. He confirmed the results by comparing the electrical signals from his silicon retina to the electrical signals produced by a salamander eye while the two retinas were looking at the same image.

On 21 July 2015, the BBC's medical correspondent Fergus Walsh reported, "Surgeons in Manchester have performed the first bionic eye implant in a patient with the most common cause of sight loss in the developed world. Ray Flynn, 80, has dry age-related macular degeneration which has led to the total loss of his central vision. He is using a retinal implant which converts video images from a miniature video camera worn on his glasses. He can now make out the direction of white lines on a computer screen using the retinal implant." The implant, known as the Argus II and manufactured in the US by the company Second Sight Medical Products, had been used previously in patients who were blind as the result of the rare inherited degenerative eye disease retinitis pigmentosa.

On 17 February 2020, Darren Fuller, a military veteran became the first person to receive a bionic arm. Fuller lost the lower section of his right arm while serving term in Afghanistan during an incident that involved mortar ammunition in 2008.

Politics

A political form of biomimicry is bioregional democracy, wherein political borders conform to natural ecoregions rather than human cultures or the outcomes of prior conflicts.

Critics of these approaches often argue that ecological selection itself is a poor model of minimizing manufacturing complexity or conflict, and that the free market relies on conscious cooperation, agreement, and standards as much as on efficiency – more analogous to sexual selection. Charles Darwin himself contended that both were balanced in natural selection – although his contemporaries often avoided frank talk about sex, or any suggestion that free market success was based on persuasion, not value.

Advocates, especially in the anti-globalization movement, argue that the mating-like processes of standardization, financing and marketing, are already examples of runaway evolution – rendering a system that appeals to the consumer but which is inefficient at use of energy and raw materials. Biomimicry, they argue, is an effective strategy to restore basic efficiency.

Biomimicry is also the second principle of Natural Capitalism.

Other uses

Business biomimetics is the latest development in the application of biomimetics. Specifically it applies principles and practice from biological systems to business strategy, process, organisation design and strategic thinking. It has been successfully used by a range of industries in FMCG, defence, central government, packaging and business services. Based on the work by Phil Richardson at the University of Bath the approach was launched at the House of Lords in May 2009.

In a more specific meaning, it is a creativity technique that tries to use biological prototypes to get ideas for engineering solutions. This approach is motivated by the fact that biological organisms and their organs have been well optimized by evolution. In chemistry, a biomimetic synthesis is a chemical synthesis inspired by biochemical processes.

Another, more recent meaning of the term bionics refers to merging organism and machine. This approach results in a hybrid system combining biological and engineering parts, which can also be referred as a cybernetic organism (cyborg). Practical realization of this was demonstrated in Kevin Warwick's implant experiments bringing about ultrasound input via his own nervous system.

Bio-inspired robotics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Two u-CAT robots that are being developed at the Tallinn University of Technology to reduce the cost of underwater archaeological operations

Bio-inspired robotic locomotion is a fairly new subcategory of bio-inspired design. It is about learning concepts from nature and applying them to the design of real-world engineered systems. More specifically, this field is about making robots that are inspired by biological systems. Biomimicry and bio-inspired design are sometimes confused. Biomimicry is copying from nature while bio-inspired design is learning from nature and making a mechanism that is simpler and more effective than the system observed in nature. Biomimicry has led to the development of a different branch of robotics called soft robotics. The biological systems have been optimized for specific tasks according to their habitat. However, they are multifunctional and are not designed for only one specific functionality. Bio-inspired robotics is about studying biological systems, and look for the mechanisms that may solve a problem in the engineering field. The designer should then try to simplify and enhance that mechanism for the specific task of interest. Bio-inspired roboticists are usually interested in biosensors (e.g. eye), bioactuators (e.g. muscle), or biomaterials (e.g. spider silk). Most of the robots have some type of locomotion system. Thus, in this article different modes of animal locomotion and few examples of the corresponding bio-inspired robots are introduced.

Stickybot: a gecko-inspired robot

Biolocomotion

Biolocomotion or animal locomotion is usually categorized as below:

Locomotion on a surface

Locomotion on a surface may include terrestrial locomotion and arboreal locomotion. We will specifically discuss about terrestrial locomotion in detail in the next section.

Big eared townsend bat (Corynorhinus townsendii)

Locomotion in a fluid

Locomotion in a blood stream or cell culture media swimming and flying. There are many swimming and flying robots designed and built by roboticists. Some of them use miniaturized motors or conventional MEMS actuators (such as piezoelectric, thermal, magnetic, etc), while others use animal muscle cells as motors.

Behavioral classification (terrestrial locomotion)

There are many animal and insects moving on land with or without legs. We will discuss legged and limbless locomotion in this section as well as climbing and jumping. Anchoring the feet is fundamental to locomotion on land. The ability to increase traction is important for slip-free motion on surfaces such as smooth rock faces and ice, and is especially critical for moving uphill. Numerous biological mechanisms exist for providing purchase: claws rely upon friction-based mechanisms; gecko feet upon van der walls forces; and some insect feet upon fluid-mediated adhesive forces.

Rhex: a Reliable Hexapedal Robot

Legged locomotion

Legged robots may have one, two, four, six, or many legs depending on the application. One of the main advantages of using legs instead of wheels is moving on uneven environment more effectively. Bipedal, quadrupedal, and hexapedal locomotion are among the most favorite types of legged locomotion in the field of bio-inspired robotics. Rhex, a Reliable Hexapedal robot and Cheetah are the two fastest running robots so far. iSprawl is another hexapedal robot inspired by cockroach locomotion that has been developed at Stanford University. This robot can run up to 15 body length per second and can achieve speeds of up to 2.3 m/s. The original version of this robot was pneumatically driven while the new generation uses a single electric motor for locomotion.

Limbless locomotion

Terrain involving topography over a range of length scales can be challenging for most organisms and biomimetic robots. Such terrain are easily passed over by limbless organisms such as snakes. Several animals and insects including worms, snails, caterpillars, and snakes are capable of limbless locomotion. A review of snake-like robots is presented by Hirose et al. These robots can be categorized as robots with passive or active wheels, robots with active treads, and undulating robots using vertical waves or linear expansions. Most snake-like robots use wheels, which are high in friction when moving side to side but low in friction when rolling forward (and can be prevented from rolling backward). The majority of snake-like robots use either lateral undulation or rectilinear locomotion and have difficulty climbing vertically. Choset has recently developed a modular robot that can mimic several snake gaits, but it cannot perform concertina motion. Researchers at Georgia Tech have recently developed two snake-like robots called Scalybot. The focus of these robots is on the role of snake ventral scales on adjusting the frictional properties in different directions. These robots can actively control their scales to modify their frictional properties and move on a variety of surfaces efficiently. Researchers at CMU have developed both scaled and conventional actuated snake-like robots.

Climbing

Climbing is an especially difficult task because mistakes made by the climber may cause the climber to lose its grip and fall. Most robots have been built around a single functionality observed in their biological counterparts. Geckobots typically use van der waals forces that work only on smooth surfaces. Being inspired from geckos, scientists from Stanford university have artificially created recreated the adhesive property of a gecko. Similar to seta in a gecko's leg, millions of microfibers were placed and attached to a spring. The tip of the microfiber will be sharp and pointed in usual circumstances, but upon actuation, the movement of spring will create a stress which bends these microfibers and increase their contact area to the surface of a glass or wall. Using the same technology, gecko grippers were invented by NASA scientists for different applications in space. Stickybots, and use directional dry adhesives that works best on smooth surfaces. Spinybot and the RiSE robot are among the insect-like robots that use spines instead. Legged climbing robots have several limitations. They cannot handle large obstacles since they are not flexible and they require a wide space for moving. They usually cannot climb both smooth and rough surfaces or handle vertical to horizontal transitions as well.

Jumping

One of the tasks commonly performed by a variety of living organisms is jumping. Bharal, hares, kangaroo, grasshopper, flea, and locust are among the best jumping animals. A miniature 7g jumping robot inspired by locust has been developed at EPFL that can jump up to 138 cm. The jump event is induced by releasing the tension of a spring. The highest jumping miniature robot is inspired by the locust, weighs 23 grams with its highest jump to 365 cm is "TAUB" (Tel-Aviv University and Braude College of engineering). It uses torsion springs as energy storage and includes a wire and latch mechanism to compress and release the springs. ETH Zurich has reported a soft jumping robot based on the combustion of methane and laughing gas. The thermal gas expansion inside the soft combustion chamber drastically increases the chamber volume. This causes the 2 kg robot to jump up to 20 cm. The soft robot inspired by a roly-poly toy then reorientates itself into an upright position after landing.

Behavioral classification (aquatic locomotion)

Swimming (piscine)

It is calculated that when swimming some fish can achieve a propulsive efficiency greater than 90%. Furthermore, they can accelerate and maneuver far better than any man-made boat or submarine, and produce less noise and water disturbance. Therefore, many researchers studying underwater robots would like to copy this type of locomotion. Notable examples are the Essex University Computer Science Robotic Fish G9, and the Robot Tuna built by the Institute of Field Robotics, to analyze and mathematically model thunniform motion. The Aqua Penguin, designed and built by Festo of Germany, copies the streamlined shape and propulsion by front "flippers" of penguins. Festo have also built the Aqua Ray and Aqua Jelly, which emulate the locomotion of manta ray, and jellyfish, respectively.

Robotic Fish: iSplash-II

In 2014, iSplash-II was developed by PhD student Richard James Clapham and Prof. Huosheng Hu at Essex University. It was the first robotic fish capable of outperforming real carangiform fish in terms of average maximum velocity (measured in body lengths/ second) and endurance, the duration that top speed is maintained. This build attained swimming speeds of 11.6BL/s (i.e. 3.7 m/s). The first build, iSplash-I (2014) was the first robotic platform to apply a full-body length carangiform swimming motion which was found to increase swimming speed by 27% over the traditional approach of a posterior confined waveform.

Morphological classification

Modular

Honda Asimo: A Humanoid robot

The modular robots are typically capable of performing several tasks and are specifically useful for search and rescue or exploratory missions. Some of the featured robots in this category include a salamander inspired robot developed at EPFL that can walk and swim, a snake inspired robot developed at Carnegie-Mellon University that has four different modes of terrestrial locomotion, and a cockroach inspired robot can run and climb on a variety of complex terrain.

Humanoid

Humanoid robots are robots that look human-like or are inspired by the human form. There are many different types of humanoid robots for applications such as personal assistance, reception, work at industries, or companionship. These type of robots are used for research purposes as well and were originally developed to build better orthosis and prosthesis for human beings. Petman is one of the first and most advanced humanoid robots developed at Boston Dynamics. Some of the humanoid robots such as Honda Asimo are over actuated. On the other hand, there are some humanoid robots like the robot developed at Cornell University that do not have any actuators and walk passively descending a shallow slope.

Swarming

The collective behavior of animals has been of interest to researchers for several years. Ants can make structures like rafts to survive on the rivers. Fish can sense their environment more effectively in large groups. Swarm robotics is a fairly new field and the goal is to make robots that can work together and transfer the data, make structures as a group, etc.

Soft

Soft robots are robots composed entirely of soft materials and moved through pneumatic pressure, similar to an octopus or starfish. Such robots are flexible enough to move in very limited spaces (such as in the human body). The first multigait soft robots was developed in 2011 and the first fully integrated, independent soft robot (with soft batteries and control systems) was developed in 2015.

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