At Science Today, we love stories that highlight bioinspiration—tales that reveal how close inspection of the natural world lead to problem-solving in the human realm. Engineering-wise, nature has had millions of years of trial and error to get things right, so why not learn from evolution and adaptation?

This week, the Academy will open Built for Speed, a new exhibit that explains the adaptations by fast fish and marine mammals that make them swift and speedy underwater and how boat designers use a similar process of adaptations to create ultrafast sailboats to compete in the America’s Cup race.

To get ready for Built for Speed, we’re featuring a few recent news stories about robots inspired and refined by the study of nature. Enjoy!

UC Berkeley

One of the leaders in bio-inspired robots is right across the Bay from the Academy. Biologists and engineers at UC Berkeley have been collaborating for several years on biological inspiration. And the researchers find inspiration from the most unlikely of sources. We’ve covered their gecko-inspired bot, but earlier this year news outlets featured Cal cockroach robots. Did you know that cockroaches are able to balance without using their brains? According to Discovery News, this is fabulous news for robot builders:

… One of the recurring challenges of designing a mobile robot is writing an algorithm that keeps it from falling over.

VELOCIRoACH, is a Berkeley roach bot and happens to be one of the fastest robots in the world. TAYLRoach uses its tail to make fast turns. New Scientist says that smaller is better for these robots:

Small-legged robots are being developed for search and rescue, for situations where a location is inaccessible or too dangerous for humans.

More Insect-bots

Berkeley isn’t the only academic biorobotic institution. Last week, Harvard scientists published their engineering breakthrough—the first flying insect-like robot. Ten to fifteen years in the making, this bug-bot was inspired by the biology of a fly. It has submillimeter-scale anatomy and two wafer-thin wings that flap almost invisibly, 120 times per second! Check out the video.

Do you feel like you’re being watched? Another publication last week describes a new camera, inspired by insect eyes. Made of 180 tiny lenses, the camera can take panoramic pictures that offer similar compound views to those of ants, bees and praying mantises. According to Ed Yong in National Geographic, this tiny biomimetic camera is “ideal for surveillance. Perhaps in the future, we’ll be watched by man-made flies on the walls.” Creepy!

Speaking of creepy, how about small robots that work together like a colony of ants? French and American scientists wanted to understand how individual ants, when part of a moving colony, orient themselves in the labyrinthine pathways that stretch from their nest to various food sources. They hope their robotic findings reveal “possible improvements for the design of man-made transportation networks,” according to an abstract in PLoS Computational Biology.

Snakes and Seahorses and Birds, Oh My

Want more? How about a soft snake robot that slithers? A robotic arm as flexible and protected as a seahorse’s tail? Airplane wings fashioned after the wings of a herring gull? What about a swimming and crawling robot as efficient as a salamander? All of the above? Help yourself—many of the links above have videos detailing the creations.

Speedy Virtual Robots

Finally, just because it’s super cool, check out this video on Discover’s site. Researchers at the University of Wyoming and Cornell created a computer program to design fast virtual robots. Each robot could be made out of four different materials, and only the fastest would “reproduce.”

Essentially, the researchers incentivized forward motion, so the faster the robot, the more successful it would be in the evolutionary race.

You have to see the simulations created in this “Evolution in Action.”

Image of insect-eye camera: John A. Rogers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

We love parasitic insect stories and this one is a doozy—a beautiful, yet evil creature, the emerald cockroach or jewel wasp, that paralyzes and then zombifies cockroaches. The female wasp behaves this way to lay one solitary egg on the cockroach. When the egg hatches, the larva emerges and eventually eats its way into the belly of the roach. There, the larva will make a cocoon and grow into a beautiful new wasp. This part is all old news—and for more gory details, see Carl Zimmer’s post on National Geographic, complete with video!

But here’s the new part: before the larva makes its cocoon, it completely sterilizes the inside of the not-surprisingly filthy cockroach!

Cockroaches carry bacteria and other disease-carrying microbes around in their bellies—very unhealthy for growing wasp larvae. German researchers found that the larvae secrete “several types of antibiotics, specifically the chemicals mellein and micromolide,” according to LiveScience, that kill even the nastiest of microbes.

The research, published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds these secretions promising for developing future human antibiotics.

If you’re a fish, how do you climb a waterfall? Well, if you’re a Nopili goby, the same way you eat, with your mouth, according to new research in PLoS ONE. The fish is known to inch its way up waterfalls as tall as 100 meters by using a combination of two suckers; one of these is an oral sucker also used for feeding on algae.

The researchers filmed jaw muscle movement in these fish while climbing and eating, and found that the overall movements were similar during both activities. (A video of the climbing can be found at Discover.) The researchers note that it is difficult to determine whether feeding movements were adapted for climbing, or vice versa, but the similarities are consistent with the idea that these fish have learned to use the same muscles to meet two very different needs of their unique lifestyle.

ScienceShot describes this as “exaptation—when a structure that was meant for one function is co-opted for another.”

Finally, ever since I saw the headline, “Birds May Get Emotional Over Birdsong,” it made me think of this line from High Fidelity (the movie, but likely the Nick Hornby book, too), “Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”

Well, it turns out that birds don’t get that emotional over their kin’s tweets, but researchers at Emory University found that white-throated sparrows experience some of the same emotions as a human listening to music. The recent study, published in the Frontiers of Evolutionary Neuroscience, demonstrates that taste is everything for these songs.

“We found that the same neural reward system is activated in female birds in the breeding state that are listening to male birdsong, and in people listening to music that they like,” says Sarah Earp, lead author of the study. Turns out another male hearing that same male birdsong likens it to music from scary scenes of a horror movie.

For more about this bird-brained study and its origins, check out this press release.

(Title thanks to the 1980s TV show)

Image: Sharadpunita/Wikipedia

Among their subjects are geckos and cockroaches. “Cockroaches continue to surprise us,” says Full, a professor of integrative biology who 15 years ago discovered that when cockroaches run rapidly, they rear up on their two hind legs like bipedal humans. “They have fast relay systems that allow them to dart away quickly in response to light or motion at speeds up to 50 body lengths per second, which is equivalent to a couple hundred miles per hour, if you scale up to the size of humans. This makes them incredibly good at escaping predators.”

Besides their speed to evade predators, cockroaches are also able to flip under ledges and disappear in the blink of an eye, the UC Berkeley researchers report recently in PLoS ONE. The cockroach does this by grabbing the edge with grappling hook-like claws on its back legs and swinging like a pendulum 180 degrees to land firmly underneath, upside down.

This pendulum swing subjects the animal to 3-5 times the force of gravity (3-5 gs), similar to what humans feel at the bottom of a bungee jump, lead author Jean-Michel Mongeau says.

(Video of the feat is available here.)

Surprisingly, the researchers observed geckos using this same escape technique both in the lab and in the rain forest at the Wildlife Reserves near Singapore.

“This behavior is probably pretty widespread, because it is an effective way to quickly move out of sight for small animals,” Full says.

Full and his colleagues make good with these obsessions with animal movements. They use the mechanics found in nature for robotics. Nature has had millions of years to develop the engineering, so why not borrow it?

“This work is a great example of the amazing maneuverability of animals, and how understanding the physical principles used by nature can inspire design of agile robots,” UC Berkeley engineering professor Ron Fearing says.

With the help of Poly-PEDAL Lab’s observations, Fearing’s team created a robot that can turn onto ledges like the roaches and geckos.

This new robot could help in dangerous search and rescue missions, according to Full. “That’s really the challenge now in robotics: to produce robots that can transition on complex surfaces and get into dangerous areas that first responders can’t get into.”

Photo by Jean-Michel Mongeau and Pauline Jennings, courtesy of PolyPEDAL Lab, UC Berkeley

But here’s an interesting twist to the tale. A recently designed robot at the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab at UC Berkeley is now shedding light on flight evolution.

A research team, led by Ron Fearing—we highlighted some of his early biomimicry work a few years ago here—wanted their robotic cockroach, DASH, to move faster. DASH is a lightweight, speedy robot made of inexpensive, off-the-shelf materials first launched in 2009. Its small size makes it a candidate for deployment in areas too cramped or dangerous for humans to enter, such as collapsed buildings.

But compared with its biological inspiration, the cockroach, DASH had certain limitations as to where it could scamper. Remaining stable while going over obstacles is fairly tricky for small robots, so the researchers affixed DASH with lateral and tail wings borrowed from a store-bought toy to see if that would help.

The researchers ran tests on four different configurations of the robotic roach, now called DASH+Wings. The test robots included one with a tail only and another that just had the wing’s frames, to determine how the wings impacted locomotion.

With its motorized flapping wings, DASH+Wings’ running speed nearly doubled, going from from 0.68 meters per second with legs alone to 1.29 meters per second. The robot could also take on steeper hills, going from an incline angle of 5.6 degrees to 16.9 degrees.

“With wings, we saw improvements in performance almost immediately,” says Kevin Peterson, a Ph.D. student in Fearing’s lab. “Not only did the wings make the robot faster and better at steeper inclines, it could now keep itself upright when descending.

The engineering team’s work caught the attention of animal flight expert Robert Dudley, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology, who noted that the most dominant theories on flight evolution have been primarily derived from scant fossil records and theoretical modeling.

He referenced previous computer models suggesting that ground-dwellers, given the right conditions, would need only to triple their running speed in order to build up enough thrust for takeoff. The fact that DASH+Wings could maximally muster a doubling of its running speed suggests that wings do not provide enough of a boost to launch an animal from the ground. This finding is consistent with the theory that flight arose from animals that glided downwards from some height.

“The fossil evidence we do have suggests that the precursors to early birds had long feathers on all four limbs, and a long tail similarly endowed with a lot of feathers, which would mechanically be more beneficial for tree-dwelling gliders than for runners on the ground,” says Dudley.

Dudley said that the winged version of DASH is not a perfect model for proto-birds – it has six legs instead of two, and its wings use a sheet of plastic rather than feathers – and thus cannot provide a slam-dunk answer to the question of how flight evolved.

“It’s still notable that adding wings to DASH resulted in marked improvements in its ability to get around,” Fearing adds. “It shows that flapping wings may provide some advantages evolutionarily, even if it doesn’t enable flight.”

Their research was published online today in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.

Image by Kevin Peterson, Biomimetic Millisystems Lab

But, if “an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success,” according to the leading textbook of AI, then researchers at Case Western Reserve University are looking in the right place: a cockroach’s brain.

Scientists wanted to figure out how insects make quick decisions about movement. According to a study published today in Current Biology, “Animals negotiating complex natural terrain must consider cues around them and alter movement parameters accordingly.”

The researchers had a hunch that these decisions were made in the central complex portion of an insect’s brain, so they decided to study cockroaches to confirm their suspicions. Easier said than done.

To get these first recordings of neural activity, Research Assistant Alan Pollack spent more than a year perfecting techniques for brain surgery in an area the size of the head of a pin. Then, after delicately cutting through the brain sheath and exposing the central complex, he inserted a hair-thin braid of four wires that can monitor activity of groups of neurons or stimulate the groups with electricity.

With the wires implanted, cockroaches were tethered over the simplest version of a treadmill: a greased glass plate. The researchers waited, sometimes for three hours or more, for a cockroach to begin walking, and to change speeds, all without prodding. (To see a video of the movement and description of the process, click here.)

They did indeed find that neurons in the central complex are responsible for movement. In fact, the firing of neurons is correlated with the insect’s stepping rate. That is, cockroaches walk or run when their brains decide to do so. According to Sasha Zill, who is familiar with this research, “It was a real accomplishment to record the neural activity of walking. The interesting finding is the cockroach can control speed with the brain.”

Next, they hope to discover which individual neurons within the central complex are doing the work.

Roy Ritzmann, lead author of the study, said, “We see in these animals an ability to adapt to difficult and changing terrain and conditions. What we’d like to see is a robotic brain that can make these kinds of decisions.”

He believes the research could help lead to robots with improved abilities to search collapsed mines and buildings, to pilot drones and for space exploration.

In attempting to discover how pre-historic, 300 million year old cockroaches lived and behaved, a team of scientists in London have modeled a fossilized specimen of Archimylacris eggintoni, and published their research in the journal Biology Letters.

Archimylacris eggintoni is an ancient ancestor of modern cockroaches, mantises and termites. This insect scuttled around on Earth during the Carboniferous period 359 — 299 million years ago, which was a time when life had recently emerged from the oceans to live on land.

The study reveals for the first time how Archimylacris eggintoni‘s physical traits helped it to thrive on the floor of Earth’s early forests. The fossils of these creatures are normally between 2cm and 9cm in length and approximately 4cm in width.

“Thanks to our 3D modelling process, we can see how Archimylacris eggintoni‘s limbs were well adapted for all terrains, as it was not only adept in the air but also very agile on the ground,” according to Russell Garwood, a PhD student from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London and the lead author of the study.

Using a CT scanning device, the researchers were able to take 3,142 x-rays of the fossil and compile the images into an accurate 3D model, creating a ‘virtual fossil’ of the creature.

Because very few limbs of this species—or other roach-like insects from this era—have been preserved in fossils, it has been hard for scientists to glean insights into their way of life. But the new model suggests that Archimylacris eggintoni‘s legs could help it to run fast.

They were able to gleam more information, as well. Garwood adds: “We now think this ancient ancestor of the cockroach spent most of the day on the forest floor, living in and eating lots of rotting plant and insect matter, which was probably the bug equivalent of heaven. We think it could have used its speed to evade predators and its climbing abilities to scale trees and lay eggs on leaves, much in the same way that modern forest cockroaches do today.”

Image Credit: Imperial College London and the Natural History Museum