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In this TED talk, Ross Lovegrove presents some great points for using nature as inspiration for design. Compared to both Janine Benyus and Robert Full, Ross labels the process of inspiration as "DNA", or "Design, Nature, Art". During the talk, Lovegrove advocates a "fat-free" design process that involves the incorporation of nature's efficient design process into design. He is also very passionate about the organic shape that is found throughout nature and using that shape to build products, and thus use less resources to build it. Although Ross talks of a great way of thinking that needs to be adopted by the industry, the products that he shows in his talk are far from realistic. His water bottle design is far from efficient when compared to the current water bottles already in production and his other designs are extremely expensive. I still believe that his underlying teachings are necessary, but his direction for them is a little off. What do you guys think of him? Are his designs realistic or are they just a way to demonstrate the usefullness of Biomimicry?

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.

A slide show of "biomimics." Annoying, but slow auto-play, however, there is a pause option at the top right of the pictures to allow for more time to read.

These are some fantastic pictures - a probably more up-to-date version of the "15-coolest-cases" article (this slide-show is from 2008). I had actually never seen the picture of the woodpecker-hammer. Can somebody make a list of inspirations and the products and put them in the comments? That way you do not have to sit through the slow-slide show if you are looking for something in particular. Think of this annotation section as a reminder for you about the site - what is in it and what you did (not) like about it.

This article is about artificial ant robots that were programmed to find disks that represented food and resources and push the disks to a designated area. The robots also went through artificial natural selection and gene flow. The experiment showed that after about 150 generations, the robots evolved to help each other push the large disks. This evolved altruism was predicted by biologist W.D. Hamilton in 1964 when he was trying to explain why organisms evolve to share time and resources. This could be a very interesting fact to use for future robots, because the robots could work together on a project without human direction.

A great video about applying Biomimicry to Architecture. During the talk Michael Pawlyn discusses the ability to increase resource efficiency, create natural cyclical systems within buildings, and incorporating solar technology into sustainable design. He touches on a number of things we have already discussed like the Nimibian Beetle and the fiber produced by spiders. The video is another great example of how far we are from living in unison with the Earth and how much work still needs to be done. I was always a big fan of TED before this class but after finding all these great talks on Biomimicry I'm going TED crazy!

This website is all devoted to the applications of shark skin. Great way to use the design in nature to solve the problems we have to use chemicals for. Linked to a solution for boats, but if you explore the website you'll find other ways that this could be used.

It's a pretty long article but very worth reading. It talks about several ideas about ideas of new smart fabrics. Some of the ideas are from the biomaterials we talked in class like silk and soft composites. I especially like the innovation of self-dealing fabrics which is inspired by skins and the one inspired by chameleon skin and fish scale. It's cool when you see some ideas you never thought about. Enjoy.

something wrong with the link. I shorten the link here. Hope it works. http://bit.ly/fEHAaH

This is a pretty short but interesting article about bullet trains in Japan. Although the trains are extremely fast, they were very noisy when coming out of tunnels due to the air pressure difference created when they exited the tunnels at such high speeds. Therefore, engineers designed the nose of the train after the kingfisher's beak because the kingfisher is a bird that can dive into water at high speeds with very little splashing.

In this TED talk Paul Wolpe discusses the current excels in bioengineering and whether there is a line that needs to be drawn. According to Paul, man has undergone three major waves of evolutions: Darwinian Evolution (passive), Civiliization (controlling the evolutionary environment), and Directed Evolution (design). For the first time in history man is intentionally designing and altering the physiological forms that inhabit our planet. In the speech, Paul posses the question of what are the "ground rules" for bioengineering and creating life by depicting the work we have done so far. The majority of food in the supermarket today already has genetically modified aspects of it without clear regulations or identification on the packages. Are the benefits that may come from genetically modifying organisms worth the manipulation of nature? Paul also talks of recent successfull experiments in which scientists have been able to control animals through computer technology. An "Organic Robot". What do you guys think? Is it right for us to modify animals in order to benefit ourselves? Where is the line drawn? This is no longer science fiction, but a reality.

This is a great self-help guide for anyone who is struggling to come up with ideas from nature. This guide walks you through different techniques you can use to see the inspiration in nature. Yes this is for photography, but if you think big picture this is a guide to find inspiration in nature regardless of your end product. Quick Overview: 1)Take a Closer Look 2)Focus on Variety in a Specific Category 3)Stop Studying Plants 4)Explore Different Perspectives 5)Think of Nature in Motion 6)Combine Opposites 7)Spice up the Color 8)Focus Only on Texture 9)Focus Only on Shape 10)Think How You Want the End User to Feel 11)Use Nature-Inspired Culture 12)Illustrate a Scene from Scratch 13)Create an Abstract Composite of Photographs 14)Use your Imagination 15)Reflect on a Place You Love 16)Zoom Out 17)Create an Imaginary World

John, this is an excellent idea. Thanks for sharing. I will definitely save it to share with future courses.

This article talks about a study of the special feature of flying snakes, which has perfect active movement. This study will help us to understand how snake move smoothly or even fly. They finally came up with an idea of snake-like military aircraft, which I think is very creative and jump out of the box of the classic design of aircraft.

I found this amazing TED talk by aircraft designer and environmentalist Paul MacCready given way back in 1998. While this talk was given over a decade ago, he talks about the problems that we are facing today. MacCready discusses humans' great advancements in technology and about what we all can do to preserve nature's delicate balance. Here's a great excerpt from the talk that provides a great overview of the topics: "Over billions of years on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life: complex, improbable, wonderful and fragile. Suddenly, we humans, a recently arrived species, no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature, have grown in population, technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power. We now wield the paintbrush, and that's serious. We're not very bright. We're short on wisdom; we're high on technology. Where's it going to lead?" - Paul MacCready During his talk he promotes the great potential and future in solar planes, superefficient gliders and the electric car. Its amazing to watch this video and see that we have had this technology for over a decade and it is still not utilized to its full potential. Other than the great information and points made, the presentation of the talk was very entertaining and includes a variety of videos and demonstrations ranging from mini RC aircrafts to ultra light rubberband powered active flyers. Discussing the future of the Earth Paul has a great quote: "I personally think the surviving intelligent life form on earth is not going to be carbon-based; it's going to be silicon-based."

This a great talk on Solar Energy and a new innovative way to improve on our current notion of solar energy. According to Bill Gross, current solar panels that rely on silicon and other materials are still not cost effective enough to be practical. I most cases, it takes more energy to make a solar cell, than it will give out in its entire life. This led to the challenge of finding other ways of making cost-effective solar energy for use in our society. The talk covers Gross's solution of collecting the sun using reflectors to concentrate the energy to a small converter, how to design these reflectors, and what converter would be used to turn this solar energy into usable energy. In order to solve the problem of finding the most effective way of capturing/reflecting the rays of the Sun Gross used Genetic Algorithms. The use of Genetic Algorithms is a powerful way of solving intractable problems using "natural selection". You take a problem that you can't solve with a pure mathematical answer, you build an evolutionary system to try multiple tries at guessing, you add sex - where you take half of one solution and half of another and then make new mutations - and you use natural selection to kill off not as good solutions. This process ultimately led them to some great ideas for reflectors. In order to capture this heat from the solar rays Gross utilizes an advanced Sterling Engine mechanism. In summary, I highly suggest that everyone watch this video and see these alternative methods of capturing and converting solar energy.

more on insect robots  

Can you "annotate" or "describe" this website a little bit more? What did you like about it, did it give you any ideas? The website of course promotes the HML (I like the logo?) but are there any weaknesses in their design - yes, the flying robot is very small - but it is no where near autonomous. So, try to convince your classmates to go visit the site by annotating it. And also see the annotation as a way for you remember in 1 year what you liked about the site , to determine it if is worth visiting again.

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.

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I found this (fairly small) website about biomimicry and how it can be applied to architecture. It has some really cool articles including one about a carbon neutral housing design based off of coral that they would like to see implemented in Haiti. Great stuff, wish the site was larger!

This article talks about some really interesting possible bio-inspired sensors on future robots. They're very likely to achieve according to the current technical development.

Remember those wheel rolling caterpillars? Well now they are the focus of an robot which they have inspired. The problem is that soft body robots are slow, so for a solution scientist look to nature and found that these caterpillars have amazing speed yet are remarkably quite squishy. By mimicking them they have made advancements to help overcome this problem.

I found a sandy robot inspired by spiders and crabs in IEEE. Their ideas are practical and very likely to be applied in future.