Natural Inspiration Gives way to RoboSnail and RoboClam [VIDEO]

Slow, slimy and sometimes pesky creatures, snails, ostensibly are not all that inspiring. But the fact that snails can move in any direction across nearly any surface served as inspiration for a team of mechanical engineers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create a snail-inspired robot.

The RoboSnail, as the creation is known, takes a cue from a living snail, the slimy underbelly of which has a sticky substance that enables the creature to adhere to and move across surfaces as rough as tree bark or as smooth as glass. Moreover, snails can move horizontally, vertically and upside down across these varied surfaces, lending inspiration to engineers who have designed a snail-like robot that could one day be used in a variety of ways, including in invasive surgery and oil-well drilling.

Anette Hosoi, professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies snails, which she said were the inspiration for the new robot design. Hosoi said designers have always turned for nature for bioinspiration, which she said is a way to "do things better by looking at natural strategies and functions."

"Looking at organisms like snails and clams can help us develop new robotic technologies because those kinds of animals have capabilities that current robots don't have," she said. "For example, snails can climb up vertical walls, they can flip over and climb across ceilings. We don't have robots that can do that."

Speaking at the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Hosoi also discussed the razor clam, an animal that has inspired another robot. Razor clams are efficient diggers, capable of burrowing themselves in more than two feet of sand. Hosoi's RoboClam is designed with the intention to explore more possibilities of designing a more efficient digging robot that uses less energy than current technology and equipment.

Hosoi said that just copying nature is not adequate. For success, it's essential to understand the underlying physics behind why and how animals can do what they do.

"Our goal in these problems is to actually understand the fundamental physics, understand the fundamental mechanics, and use that to advance technology," she said. "Digging is currently energetically expensive. But if you look at the energy consumed by clams its orders of magnitude less than what we use in current digging technology. So there's definitely room for improvement that possibly we can achieve by looking at those natural systems."