Better Than Nature Made It

Abstract

As poets are inclined to point out, the ways in which inspiration can be taken from nature are wondrous, infinite, and varied. In the pursuit of bio-inspired robotics, inspiration doesn't always mean simply copying nature. Instead, many roboticists believe in distilling the fundamental principles at work in organisms and then incorporating those principles in robots, creating a machine that may look nothing like the organisms that inspired it. “We think blind copying is exactly what you don't want to do,” says Robert Full, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “You will fail miserably, because nature is way too complex.”