“In design, Mother Nature is our best teacher” – Van Day Truex, a renowned American interior designer, professor of design and painter. And Nature, by definition, is “the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations”. Many ancient philosophers, scientists, engineers, and researchers have been inspired by nature to find innovative, hi-tech solutions to human challenges and improve the technological design possibilities. This is more commonly known as biomimicry – mimicking biological evolution and processes. The simple velcro is a classic example of an engineering design based on biomimicry that was patented back in 1958!
Fast forward to 2017, and we get a robot inspired by growing vines from the researchers at Stanford University, USA. A tad unimaginatively named as the “vinebot”, these robots are essentially a tube of soft material (plastic was used in the demonstration/prototype) that can “grow” (lengthen) along one direction through a smart control of air pressure. It’s like the case when you turn the rolled-up sleeves of a shirt inside out. Similarly, the material is fed into the tube from one end along with a strong gust of air, and the other end of the tube “everts” (turns inside out) due to this air pressure. Even the direction in which the robot grows can be controlled through a smart manipulation of the direction of air flow.
The vinebot is a member of the more recent soft-robots family, which are devoid of a strong metallic body and have widespread applications ranging from electronics/ human body repair to underwater explorations. The inventors of the vinebot are predicting its use in applications such as lifting heavy weights, rescue missions in hard to traverse areas such as rubble after an earthquake and even wiring through nooks and crannies. Ultimately, as per the researchers, it might even be possible to avoid invasive surgery (surgery that requires cutting up the body) if these robots can be enhanced to travel through human blood vessels and organs!
