This month’s topics:

Silkworm pavilion

Another compound eye

Some of the stories behind insect-inspired robots

Anti-counterfeit money thanks to butterflies

How to defeat hackers

Miscellaneous – things I learned about social media while writing the blog-post.

Silkworm pavilion

I ended last month’s “Bits and Bytes” with a mention of a project that was making the rounds under the heading #biomimicry. I am still not sure if this really falls under biomimicry or bioinspiration, but during the month of June it kept popping up on Twitter, probably because it is just very, very cool. The project received extra attention because the project was on display in Boston, the city where the Biomimicry3.8 Education Summit and Global Conference was held during the month of June – so cross-pollination for all!

The Mediated Matter group, under the guidance of Professor Neri Oxman, studies additive fabrication techniques (such as 3D printing) and tries to scale some of them up to, for instance, building-size structures. One of the projects involves mobile swarm building where small robots could potentially build large structures. For this project, which is ongoing, they are currently studying how silkworms (the caterpillars of the moth Bombyx mori) can inform this type of building technique.

SILK PAVILION from Mediated Matter Group on Vimeo.

Reference:

Silk Pavilion information can be found on the Mediated Matter website here (tools: swarm printing), and here (environments: silk pavilion), and here (news: silk pavilion).

Coverage:

• Bug Girl – Bug Girl’s Blog (June 9, 2013) – Silk Pavilion
• Margaret Badore – TreeHugger.com (June 4, 2013) – Silk pavilion from MIT’s Media Lab is a beautiful example of biomimicry.
• Mark Wilson FastCoDesign.com (June 10, 2013). How MIT is hacking thousands of worms to print buildings

“The silkworm embodies everything an additive fabrication system currently lacks.” Neri Oxman on the Silk Pavilion http://t.co/p7TxvQJbKr

— MIT Media Lab (@medialab) June 11, 2013

Another compound eye

Last month’s Bits and Bytes started off with the perfect insect-inspired story: an engineered compound eye from a University of Illinois lab. Great story to lead off the inaugural issue of a recurring blog feature – considering I cover insects, engineering and work at UIUC. Turns out that some of my ommatidia neglected to notice another story very similar to the one I covered. Last month the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPF-Lausanne also created a miniature curved artificial compound eye.

Maybe the manufacturing technique and the material used are not as cutting-edge as those used in the Rogers’ lab, but it seems to me that the final creation is a lot more like an insect compound eye.

The design consists of three planar layers of separately produced arrays, namely, a microlens array, a neuromorphic photodetector array, and a flexible printed circuit board that are stacked, cut, and curved to produce a mechanically flexible imager.

Reference: Floreano, D., R. Pericet-Camara, S. Viollet, F. Ruffier, A. Brückner, R. Leitel, W. Buss, M. Menouni, F. Expert, R. Juston, M.K. Dobrzynski, G. L’Eplattenier, F. Recktenwald, H.A. Mallot & N. Franceschini. (2013) Miniature curved artificial compound eyes. PNAS V110 (230, pp 9267-9272. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1219068110

Coverage:

• Miniature curved artificial compound eye published in PNAS (May 21st, 2013), by Ramon Pericet-Camara (second author on the article).
• Tiny Robotic Compound Eyes Unveiled (May 20th, 2013) by Jesse Emspak (@Mad_Science_Guy).
• Robotic Insect Eyes Destined for Next-Gen Micro Drones (May 20th, 2013), by Evan Ackerman (@BotJunkie)

Some of the stories behind insect-inspired robots

Robotic insects were again quite popular this month, or at least on Twitter they were. As I covered in an earlier post (The Dawn of the Artificial Coprophages) engineers have been interested in building robots that move and behave similar to insects for quite a while. It first started with terrestrial locomotion, but now we also see insect-inspired robots that can swim, walk on water, dig, jump and (The Holy Grail) fly.

Here are a few insect-inspired robots that came across my computer screen this week:

Flies

Nature Magazine’s News and Views section (=behind a pay-wall) published a great 2-page article by David Lentink (Dept. of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University) covering the history of “robotic fly”.

• Lentink, David (2013) Biomimetics: Flying like a fly. Nature V498 (7454). pp 306-307. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12258

Lentink reviews how the basic research on aerodynamics of insect flight inspired engineers to build robots using the data obtained by the biologists. And how this cross-pollination occurs at the same time as micro-manufacturing techniques are being developed. The article culminates with a recent publication from Rob Wood’s Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory.

• Ma, K. Y., Chirarattananon, P., Fuller, S. B. & Wood, R. J. 2013. Controlled flight of a biologically inspired, insect-scale robot. Science. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1231806

  • This article was also covered by Peter Forbes (author of the Gecko’s Foot) on his blog.

  • as did I in last month’s Bits and Bytes.

Termites

This item does not need much introduction beyond this tweet:

In what is my new favourite @story_collider episode, Justin Werfel goes to Namibia to study termites for #biomimicry http://t.co/UKfegl5LzX

— Morgan Jackson (@BioInFocus) June 21, 2013

Other

Some other popular science articles that came out this month but covered research that was made public earlier this year:

• Robot ants could make us more efficient. By Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato (@mbloudoff) at nationageographic.com.

• Harvard is building robotic cockroaches (video). By Michael Graham Richard (@Michael_GR) at treehugger.com

I also found the article by Emily Monosson for Aeon Magazine an interesting read.

• Robot evolution. Hod Lipson’s artificial organisms have already escaped from the virtual realm. Now he wants to send them out of control, by Emily Monosson (June 11th, 2013)

Monosson does not mention insect or insect-inspired robots specifically but she does wonder if life/AI can evolve from wires and plastic. Considering all the work that is being done on insect-inspired robots I assume that we will soon find out.

Aye, robot. Evolving artificial intelligence for robotics. Interesting: http://t.co/mLL5Z18ZmL #robotics #biomimicry via @aeonmag‎

— Malcolm M. Campbell (@m_m_campbell) June 20, 2013

Anti-counterfeit money thanks to butterflies

Another story that received a lot of twitter-buzz this month was the one about Morpho butterflies serving as inspiration for anti-counterfeit money. The fact that Morphos (and many other butterflies and moths) use structural colors has been known for some time. Engineers and Material Scientists have also been interested, for quite a while now, in manufacturing materials that incorporate nanostructures similar to those on the butterfly wing. So that begs the question, why is this big news now? Probably because of a strategically placed corporate press release. It is interesting to see that news can spread quickly via social media (see silkworm pavilion story, for instance) but also that the story never really goes away.

Reference: ??

Coverage:

• Dixon Tam, Simon Fraser University Public Affairs and Media Relations (January 17, 2011) Butterfly wings behind anti-counterfeiting technology
• Jason Bittel – Slate.com Future Tense (June 12, 2013). Counterfeit this: New security technology inspired by a butterfly.
• Joel N. Shurkin – Inside Science News Service (June 10, 2013). Butterflies inspire anti-counterfeit technology.

How to defeat hackers

Another example of how not-really-news becomes (again) a relatively big story is the article by Rafe Sagerin on how biomimicry can help us stay ahead of hackers. This article was basically a synopsis of his 2012 book called “Learning from the Octopus” which was fun book to read – but did not feature near enough insect examples. This article mentions only one insect (the stingless bee, go figure) but sentences like;

“The best bet is to do what the most successful organisms on Earth do — accept the risk and adapt to the changes”

immediately makes me think of insects since they are so very very successful and ubiquitous.

That this particular article became so popular this month showed me that getting your core-message (look to nature to fight terrorists, diseases, hackers) into a magazine where the topic is not typically discussed (Harvard Business Review) will help reach a lot of new sets of eyes and will familiarize more people with the terms biomimicry and bioinspiration.

Miscellaneous

Lessons I learned from Twitter and this blog-post during the month of June:

1. There is a lot of cool stuff out there about insect-inspired technology. I need to become better about cataloging all the awesomeness as it becomes available during the month. (Any tips?)
2. There is so much cool stuff out there that sometimes I miss something, especially if the topics are similar to each other. Last month I assumed the engineered compound eye stories were one story, but it turns out that they are actually two different approaches.
3. Some stories seem like new but they may actually be receiving a “second wind”, because a journalist/science writer revisits the story or because of a simple retweet. Some stories therefore never really disappear.
4. Placing a story in a non-traditional media outlet will result in a whole bunch of new eyes seeing the work, and that is a good thing.

And after all these years I am still unsure if certain areas of research really fall under bioinspiration or biomimicry (for example, the silkworm story or biofuels). And that is OK. Not everything will fit neatly in a box, even though the scientist-side of me wishes it would.