This week on the Discovery Tech site, I'm featuring technology that's used to study sharks and technology inspired by sharks. (What can I do? It is Shark Week on Discovery Channel, after all.) It's the latter category that has inspired today's blog post. Technology inspired by nature, or biomimetic technology.
Engineers Sung-Weon Yeom and Il-Kwon Oh from Chonnam National University in the Republic of Korea have taken inspiration from the jellyfish and turned it into a robot. The scientists used a polymer (plastic) metal composites that is flexible but can also respond to an electrical charge. It was used to make moving parts that behave like biological muscles.
"This is the first jellyfish robot based on the electro-active polymer artificial muscle," Oh told PhysOrg.com.
The muscle material is important for this type of application because it's compact, efficient, easy to steer and quiet.
"They could be used as entertainment robots, micro/nano-robots, and biomedical robots in the near future," said Oh.
This is a good lesson for everyone that robots aren't necessarily rigid, and in the future they may be as flexible as boneless sea creatures.
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