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Bionics: Snails, Slugs, and Slime
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originally posted by Dominic Muren (mailto:admin@idfuel.com) from IDFuel - The Industrial Design Weblog, reBlogged by bev on February 23, 2005
Both MIT and Case Western are doing research on snail movement, with the intention of building snail robots for exploration of internal human anatomy. For example, colonoscopies, while helped by ever-shrinking instrumentation, are still notoriously uncomfortable, because the spiraling intestine makes threading an endoscope difficult and painful. A robot which could gently pull a camera through the intestines or arteries would be able to find problems with much less damage to the patient's tissue. A video of Case's prototype is available here.Also interesting, is the mode of movement in slugs and snails. These animals have no bones for muscles to push against; Instead, they use systems of muscles wrapped around tubes of fluid. This allows slugs and snails to be incredibly flexible and adaptable to different configurations of terrain. Currently, Case is developing a gripper system which can handle fragile, irregular objects much more carefully than current robotic arms, which is based on this principle. A chair using these principles might be much more effective at distributing weight and keeping fatigue from occurring. Finally, if all this tech talk is a little too much for you, slugs still have something to offer. Sea slugs, or nudibranchs come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. If you saw one, and didn't know it was alive, you might swear is was a soap dish, massager, or plate scrubber designed by Ron Arad. Whatever you think of them, they're worth more than just a look.  continued at ID Fuel
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