Yeah, I thought that would get your attention, but it’s a real thing. Like many of you I have a long running interest in robotics, starting with my first Lego robot as a kid and I have done work in motion control systems for machines. So I have watched with much interest what I believe as the dawn of the robotics age begin.
I have a particular interest in robotic systems that mimic natural organisms such as insects or soft tissue functions of animals, so I was very interested to learn of a robotic lionfish that uses a kind of artificial blood to store energy and provide propulsion as shown in the following clip.
The researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics claim the robot can last 8 times longer doing functions (that a robot fish would do) compared to a similar robot built in a conventional way. I won’t recount all the details you can find a nice article and more pictures at Gizmodo article
https://gizmodo.com/this-freaky-robotic-fish-is-powered-by-blood-1835651052
The bigger question is does this strategy make sense? The logic behind it is natural systems have evolved over eons to work as efficient and optimally as possible in real world environments. In general I agree, however the counter argument is they have evolved to be better then what’s around them and survive to reproduce, which is not the same as being most efficient and optimal to perform useful tasks for humans.
The way I look at it is we are learning out to make systems that mimic the characteristics of living organisms to better work in those environments but we aren’t just copying them. We will figure out how to make them but avoid the evolutionary pitfalls that I summarize as
- In a natural environment an evolutionary system needs only be better at surviving then those around it to flourish. So if all the competing solutions are poor then a poor solution may dominate.
- Natural systems can make new system magically and mutations have to work with what already exists within the organism. This intrinsically limits the options natural systems can try, so the best option may require to much of a change (barring God or alien intervention). This also means that if a feature is lost because it wasn’t useful a few million years ago well adopting it today won’t be possible.
- Natural systems are interconnected with external systems who’s impact will likely be impossible to fully understand. Case in point about half the human body isn’t human but is a vast host of other organisms that work with human cells to make a human (which sort of blows the mind to think about it).
So, given that dose of realism I still see that mimicking real organism systems in robots is still useful as we are essentially using real organisms as a reference model, much like you might use a reference design from TI. In that sense it can greatly focus our efforts to make useful robots. I think we need to develop other systems besides blood, specifically robotic muscles so I’ll when I find something useful in that area I’ll bring it to your attention and hopefully we can start a project implementing or using a robotic muscle to provide motion to your robot.
Cheers!