James McLurkin, a graduate student at MIT, is engaged in what I believe is the most profitable form of biomimetics - stealing ideas about behavior. Ants search aimlessly for food, yet after they have found it and returned (via the aimless path that brought them) to the nest, susequent workers shorten the path over successive trip until it is as direct as can be given the terrain.  The best thing is that they optimize on time which takes into account the difficulty of various routes, rather than purely on distance. 

The method the ants use is a simple byproduct of the nature of their trailing behavior.  They follow scent trails and any randomly derived trail that is a little shorter than the parent trail will smell stronger to the next ant along because there has been less time for the scent to evaporate. It is a slowly evolving solution, but it ends up near optimality without trying all possible combinations.

McLurkin builds small, autonomous robots that interact with one another in the same way ants and bees do - simpleminded exchanges of very basic information. From this basic beginning he has a start on some seriously useful robotics. The project is aimed at imbuing swarms of tiny (even nanoscale) robots with a set of useful behaviors. 

MIT Homepage

Lemelson Student Prize notice

If you are interested in keeping ahead of the biomimetics field it is a good idea to be notified when Julian Vincent publishes a new article. His book on biomaterials is the classic in the field, and as the head of the University of Bath’s Center for Biomimetics and Natural Technologies he is on the forefront of current biomimetics research. One of his research projects that is getting quite a bit of current press is on clothing that mimics pine cones in order to shed internally generated moisture.  I’ll write about that in a future entry.

The research team at Waseda University in Japan led by Fukashi Kohori is working on REALLY imitating the oxygen transport system in an artificial gill.  Rather than using an organic compound with a high oxygen affinity Kohori proposes to use the same carrier as is found in vertebrate blood - hemoglobin.  He has written a description of the design parameters for an artificial gill that could support a human underwater. As in all models of this sort there is a problem moving from theory to reality because of a mismatch between the physics of water and the physiology of humans. 

Kohori’s more plausible research is a biomimetic kidney.

Thomas Fuhrmann of the University of Kassel in Germany has been looking at the micropatterning of diatom cell walls as possible photonic crystals and photonic lasers. In a previous post I ointed out one of Furhmann’s articles. This web page has a few nice visuals with proof that it is possible to dope the silica cell wall with laser dyes then excite them to emit particular color light with a laser. Furhmann is at the exciting stage of both cataloging the diversity of naturally occurring photonic waveguides and band gap materials in the diatom cell wall and exploring the flexibility of the system. Parts of this project are in what I have called the manipulative phase while some of the other research is in the investigative phase. Since diatoms are so easy to culture and so uniform in their properties I would be unsurprised to see this project make a serious leap towards commercialization in the next couple years

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