Jul 29, 2022 06:00:00

Introducing 'Nek Robot', a remodeled spider corpse into a robot hand

In movies, games, and fantasy novels,

necromancers that manipulate human corpses appear, but engineers at Rice University in the United States have developed ' necrobot' technology that robotizes and manipulates spider corpses. Researchers say the technique, which can grab objects as dexterously and delicately as a living spider, has applications such as catching wild insects and assembling parts for microdevices.

Necrobotics: Biotic Materials as Ready-to-Use Actuators --Yap --Advanced Science --Wiley Online Library
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202201174

Rice engineers get a grip with'necrobotic' spiders | Rice News | News and Media Relations | Rice University
https://news.rice.edu/news/2022/rice-engineers-get-grip-necrobotic-spiders

You can see how the 'necrobot' made from the corpse of a spider is moving from the following.

Lab manipulates deceased spiders' legs with a puff of air to serve as grabbers --YouTube


A research team led by Assistant Professor Daniel J. Preston of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Rice University, who is researching soft robots made of soft materials, developed 'Necrobot' because a dead spider with curled legs fell on the floor. I found that.

According to the research team, the human arm can be bent and stretched by the action of the muscles that bend and stretch the joints.

On the other hand, spiders bend their legs with muscles called flexors and stretch their legs with the pressure of body fluids. The reason why the legs of dead spiders curl up is that only the force of contraction remains due to the release of pressure.

The research team, who wanted to apply this mechanism to engineering, frozen the spider, euthanized it, and then pierced the cephalothorax, that is, the body part where the eight legs are connected, with an injection needle and fixed it with adhesive. did.

In this state, if air is flowed from the injection needle, the foot will open due to pressure, and if air is removed, the foot will close.

With this function, the nex robot can grab things like a crane in a crane game. A living spider uses the valves attached to its legs to move its eight legs separately, but when the spider dies, the valves stop working, so you can operate all eight legs with air pressure alone.

One nex robot can open and close its legs about 1000 times. Beyond that, friction begins to occur, which the research team believes can be overcome by polymer coating the Necrobot, which is primarily due to dry joints.

'There are many uses for necrobots, from repetitive tasks such as sorting and moving objects on a small scale to things like assembling microelectronics,' Preston said.

'Since spiders are originally camouflaged, they may also be used to catch small insects in nature,' added Te Faye Yap, co-author of the treatise.