Biomimicry involves using natural strategies from plants and animals to create engineering designs for products and tools. It is a state of mind that can be used by any inventor or scientist. Examples include Velcro, water-resistant paint, and unmanned aerial vehicles. Biomimicry can be used to create elegant solutions to everyday problems and has cutting-edge applications such as emulating the brain of animals and creating large ornithopters and fighting robots.
Biomimicry, sometimes known as bionics or biomimicry, is the art of taking natural adaptive strategies used by plants or animals and translating them into engineering designs that can be used to implement products or tools. Biomimicry is also a relatively recent academic field based on using these strategies, centered at the University of Bath in the UK, but with adherents everywhere. Rather than considering it an independent field, biomimicry is probably best described as a state of mind that can be championed by any inventor or scientist.
There are many obvious applications of biomimicry. The Velcro is intended to simulate the gripping effect of plant burrs. The water and dirt resistant paint is said to mirror the hydrophobic skin of the lotus. The fabric can be used to create an artificial canopy.
Some unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) simulate various aspects of insects used to fly and cling to walls. Radar and sonar presumably mimic the echolocation faculties of bats. An artificial pacemaker mimics a collection of organic pacemaker cells located near the heart.
Biomimicry can be said to be present in all engineering and design to the extent that we as humans are inclined to be inspired by nature and life. We also consider much of nature to be aesthetically pleasing and may be inclined to imitate it even if there is an “unnatural” approach that does its job better. There are also fundamental elements in any complex system that can converge in their form and function, creating the inevitable similarities in biology and technology. Biomimicry can be invoked as a way to get environmental types to be more open to technology as a source of elegant solutions to everyday problems.
Other applications of biomimicry can be more cutting-edge or even futuristic than products like Velcro. In recent decades, it has become completely possible to emulate brain regions or even the entire brain of some simplistic animals such as lobsters. This is defined as biomimicry even if the emulation is only of scientific interest and has no concrete applications.
Large ornithopters, planes with flapping wings, have not yet been successfully piloted, but will be in the near future, inspired by birds. The fighting robots of the future have been described as giant insectoids when on land and giant tadpoles when at sea. Star Wars ATATs look like giant elephants. More technological marvels inspired by biomimicry are sure to come, both in the world of fiction and in our real world.
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