Siddall Robert, Zufferey Raphael, Armanini Sophie, Zhang Ketao, Sareh Sina, Sergeev Elisavetha
University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom.
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland.
Bioinspir Biomim. 2023 Mar 22;18(3). doi: 10.1088/1748-3190/acc14b.
Biomimetic and bioinspired design is not only a potent resource for roboticists looking to develop robust engineering systems or understand the natural world. It is also a uniquely accessible entry point into science and technology. Every person on Earth constantly interacts with nature, and most people have an intuitive sense of animal and plant behaviour, even without realizing it. The Natural Robotics Contest is novel piece of science communication that takes advantage of this intuition, and creates an opportunity for anyone with an interest in nature or robotics to submit their idea and have it turned into a real engineering system. In this paper we will discuss the competition's submissions, which show how the public thinks of nature as well as the problems people see as most pressing for engineers to solve. We will then show our design process from the winning submitted concept sketch through to functioning robot, to offer a case study in biomimetic robot design. The winning design is a robotic fish which uses gill structures to filter out microplastics. This was fabricated into an open source robot with a novel 3D printed gill design. By presenting the competition and the winning entry we hope to foster further interest in nature-inspired design, and increase the interplay between nature and engineering in the minds of readers.
仿生和受生物启发的设计不仅是机器人专家开发强大工程系统或理解自然世界的有力资源。它也是进入科学技术领域的一个独特的切入点。地球上的每个人都在不断地与自然互动，而且大多数人对动植物的行为都有一种直观的认识，甚至没有意识到这一点。自然机器人竞赛是一种新颖的科学传播形式，它利用了这种直觉，为任何对自然或机器人感兴趣的人创造了一个机会，让他们提交自己的想法并将其转化为一个真正的工程系统。在本文中，我们将讨论竞赛的参赛作品，这些作品展示了公众对自然的看法以及人们认为工程师最迫切需要解决的问题。然后，我们将展示从获奖的概念草图到功能正常的机器人的设计过程，以提供一个仿生机器人设计的案例研究。获奖设计是一种利用鳃结构过滤微塑料的机器鱼。它被制造成一个具有新颖3D打印鳃设计的开源机器人。通过介绍竞赛和获奖作品，我们希望激发人们对自然启发设计的进一步兴趣，并在读者心中增强自然与工程之间的相互作用。
