Gravish Nick, Lauder George V
Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA
Dept. of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 26 Oxford St, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
J Exp Biol. 2018 Mar 29;221(Pt 7):jeb138438. doi: 10.1242/jeb.138438.
For centuries, designers and engineers have looked to biology for inspiration. Biologically inspired robots are just one example of the application of knowledge of the natural world to engineering problems. However, recent work by biologists and interdisciplinary teams have flipped this approach, using robots and physical models to set the course for experiments on biological systems and to generate new hypotheses for biological research. We call this approach robotics-inspired biology; it involves performing experiments on robotic systems aimed at the discovery of new biological phenomena or generation of new hypotheses about how organisms function that can then be tested on living organisms. This new and exciting direction has emerged from the extensive use of physical models by biologists and is already making significant advances in the areas of biomechanics, locomotion, neuromechanics and sensorimotor control. Here, we provide an introduction and overview of robotics-inspired biology, describe two case studies and suggest several directions for the future of this exciting new research area.
几个世纪以来，设计师和工程师一直从生物学中汲取灵感。受生物启发的机器人只是将自然世界的知识应用于工程问题的一个例子。然而，生物学家和跨学科团队最近的工作颠倒了这种方法，利用机器人和物理模型为生物系统的实验设定方向，并为生物学研究提出新的假设。我们将这种方法称为受机器人启发的生物学；它涉及在机器人系统上进行实验，旨在发现新的生物现象或生成关于生物体如何运作的新假设，然后可以在活生物体上进行测试。这个令人兴奋的新方向源于生物学家对物理模型的广泛使用，并且已经在生物力学、运动、神经力学和感觉运动控制等领域取得了重大进展。在这里，我们对受机器人启发的生物学进行介绍和概述，描述两个案例研究，并为这个令人兴奋的新研究领域的未来提出几个方向。
