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Be it that we are nearing the end of the class, I found this video to be a very good summary of what we have covered in the class and what we can take away from it. The video is based upon the new movement of finding design inspiration from nature (Biomimicry). For this specific interview, they focus on an interview with Robert Full to educate the viewer about engineering inspiration from nature. If you remember, Robert Full believes that evolution doesn't necessarily design the perfect mechanism, but rather the mechanism that allows the animal to survive. Therefore, we as humans are able to learn from the abilities of animals gained from evolution and further refine the specific ability to be more efficient and applicable to our needs. The video covers a bunch of the innvoations we have discussed during our time in class including the gecko robot and the running robot RHex. I think this would be a nother great video to show in the beginning of the class for next semester. It presents the general idea of BioInspiration, provides examples of research and application, and also discusses the great importance it will play in the future; building more efficient and useful technology.

This article provides a nice entry point to the field of biomimicry or biological inspiration. It gives 15 well-know and/or cool examples of biomimicry. However, there are so many more examples and after this article has been up for a few years (cannot find the exact date it was published) it feels a little outdated.

This is quite a lengthy article, but if you like dense math and physics, then this is the article for you. Usually, when one thinks about bees, you think of CCD, or bees' dance. This time, scientists are interested in their vision. Using an interesting mix of mirrors and a video camera, we are actually able to somewhat recreate what a bee sees. Obviously, it's not perfect, but it's pretty close.  The central aim was to build a light-weight system that can be used as an intuitive tool for assessing the visual world from the bees' perspective by reconstructing their visual input. This system may also serve as an insect-inspired system for mobile robots, especially for small flying vehicles.

Kate, this is a very interesting article and it points out that simple systems can be just complex enough for us to learn from. Nice annotation - this type of annotation will help you in the future - I mean why read a dense paper (full of math and physics) again if it was no good in the first place.

I found this 11 minute video when I was looking up information about biomimicry for our Habitat post. Ironically this video has the same speaker from one of our lectures that we watched from moodle. It goes into detail about the history of where and how biomimicry got started, along with an interview with Robert Full that goes into greater detail of the biomimetic experiments that are being done at UC Berkeley. It was really interesting to learn where biomimicry stems from and that scientist havie been using it for many many years.

Here is another interesting article about bio-inspired robotics. They have a particularly interesting flying robot based off of a fly as well as other pages including nanostructures, biomaterials, and more.

This short article discribes the accomplishements in robotics made by Mirko Kovac, a robotics engineer. It goes into detail about his break-through in the "perching" methods that stemmed from his grasshopper-inspired robots. There is also a brief video clip that essentially describes the "perching" process of his robot. I was really amazed to find that these robots are actually programed to run into whatever object they are looking for without being harmed!

South American electric knifefish are a leading model system within neurobiology. Recent efforts have focused on understanding how they move, and how that relates to how their brain controls movement. Knifefish swim by means of an undulatory fin that runs most of the length of their body, affixed to the belly. Using this fin enables the fish to stay relatively straightforward, making them different from sharks in this regard. The results of this experiment show that there is an optimal operational region in the fin's kinematic parameter space, when the fin is used in conjunction with a robot.

The title of this article is pretty self-explanatory, although I was really suprised to find all of the basic ideas to be quite interesting and inspirational. The direct method that is ised in this article is very similar to what we discussed in the last "lecture" of class. This is an article that I will definitely be looking back on to help get the "bioinspired juices flowing" for any future ideas that I may have. I wish that I would have found this article earlier because it might have helped me with some of our earlier assignments.