Robotics
has taken an unexpected turn in the last few decades. 1950’s science fiction conditioned us to
image of advanced technology as something completely unfamiliar and exotic. These fictional images presented a family of
devices that could and would do things we’d never even imagined.
But pause
for a moment
Why do we
need a technology to do things we don’t apparently need? Think about it. If we don’t know about something and can’t
even imagine it, we probably don’t want or need it.
Out of this
was quietly born the new study. That
study, biotechnology, began from the understanding that we technology to perform
those activities with which we are most
familiar – the drudgery of repetitive tasks, and the danger of possibly
injurious tasks.
In short,
we needed technology that could perform everyday tasks in the way we might
perform them. The jeeps high suspension
revolutionized motorized travel over rough terrain, but no jeep could go to
most of the places a walking human could easily reach.
In short,
if you needed a machine to do what a particular biological organism can easily
do, you may have to design the machine that works exactly like that biological
organism – or abandon the project all together.
Modern
biorobots began about the turn of the 19th to the 20th century with a field
named biomechanics. But that certainly
wasn’t the intention of its creators or researchers of the time. They were physicists and engineers interested
in one of the greatest challenges presented by nature – understanding the
physics of the movement and actions of living organisms. Describing in mathematical, engineering
formulae how, for examples, human beings walk on two legs.
This
challenging endeavor would revolutionize the study of biology. But these researchers were also doing
something they did know or imagine. They
didn’t even have a word for it, but they were “reverse engineering” biological
species.
When sci-fi was still dominated by those inhuman and unnatural versions of
mechanistic technology, a new technological methodology was, quietly,
born. “Biomimetics” was the first term used to describe the development
of technology designed to imitate and replicate the activities of biological
systems and organisms. Then, another term, “biomimicry,” was widely
adopted to describe any technology imitating (copied from) from nature.
Again, in some contexts, biomimicry is more of a necessity than a choice.
If you want drones that work in a particular way, and the only known example of
such performance is a biological organism, you’ll either have to imitate the
organism or forget the project altogether. So, to get flying ‘bots that
maneuver the way flying insects and birds do, the ‘bots must be designed to
imitate the actual form and movement of these same creatures.
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