Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
years. Adapting the sensing capability of animals would potentially lead to affordable detection
technology.
Nature offers many capabilities that are unique to some species, and understanding the require-
ments for their adaptation can help us in many ways. Some of these capabilities are still mysteries
that can offer enormous potential for humans. One may wonder about bears' ability to sleep for
6 months without urinating and poisoning its blood. For medical applications, learning the clues to
this capability may help fight diabetes. The ability of the lizard to drop its tail as a decoy in case of
danger, and grow it back without scars is another important model for the field of medicine.
Adapting this capability can help heal the disabled and severely injured.
20.10
CONCLUSION
Over the 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has come up with inventions that are great models for
imitation and adaptation. Nature consists of a large pool of inventions although it has its own
evolution drawbacks including that nature is irreversible, cannot be planned and has crevasses in its
solution space. The field of biomimetics is multidisciplinary requiring the use of expertise from
biology, engineering, computational and material sciences, robotics, neuroscience, biomechanics,
and many other related fields. Further, several disciplines have emerged in recent years as a result of
the effort to develop biomimetic systems. The technology requires the ability to produce scaleable
mechanisms ranging from miniature — as small as nanometers scale — to giant sizes — as large as
several meters. There are still numerous challenges, but the recent trends in the field of biomimetics
— international cooperation, the greater visibility of this area of study and the surge in funding of
related research projects — offer great potential.
Nature uses minimum resources to produce maximum results, and one of the characteristics of
this aspect is the effective packing and deployment techniques that have been used by nature
allowing organisms to be fitted for the environment in which they need to operate. As seen
throughout this topic, both plants and animals have used various techniques of packing where
flowers and leaves grow from a highly packed structure in the bud. Further, animals are using
appendages for locomotion that are configured in easy-to-deploy structures, which include the fins,
legs and wings (Kresling, 2000). Beside the inspiration of effective robots, there are numerous other
inventions and mechanisms that one can be inspired to develop using such packing techniques. One
may consider deployable structures that can include tents and other large surface foldable structures
as well as gossamer structures and deployable antennas for space applications. For commercial
applications and user-friendly household products one may consider future improvements to such
tools as the food mixer that has many parts and need to be assembled and disassembled each time
the mixer is used. One may think of integrated parts that can be deployed like the wings of the bird.
Another example can be vacuum cleaners that also consist of many parts which can be easily and
rapidly deployed when needed and packed and stowed when not.
There are many areas where nature is superior, and one example is the ability to recognize
patterns and objects. We can recognize people whom we have not seen for years and who may have
grown quite older and changed significantly and we can do so even from some distance. Efforts
have been done to develop such a technology of face recognition at airports as part of the US
homeland defense technology. While significant success was observed in the early tests, the
systems that were installed at airports for face recognition were removed. This has been the result
of the many false positive indications that have been encountered.
One can find many examples in our daily life where human-made technology can be traced to
nature's inventions that were mimicked or used as an inspiration. These include many aspects of
science and engineering and learning how to do more will help humans even further. In this age of
international terror and with the need for more innovative homeland security and defense tools one
may want to examine nature's techniques and investigate the possibilities of learning more.
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