Bio-inspired Robot

仿生机器人Advanced

A robot designed by borrowing an animal's body structure or way of moving.

Bio-inspired robot isn't a single body form but a design approach: borrowing an animal's structure, movement, or sensing principles and turning them into something engineered to be simpler and more practical to build. Researchers commonly distinguish between straight biomimicry, copying the source closely, and bio-inspiration, learning the underlying principle and then simplifying it. Common sources include quadruped gaits, snake-like undulation, a gecko's adhesive footpads, an octopus's soft grasping tentacles, and the flapping flight of insects and bats. Classic examples include MIT's Cheetah quadruped, the gecko-inspired Stickybot, CMU's snake robots, and various bio-inspired prototypes from Festo. Humanoid and quadruped robots are, broadly speaking, also bio-inspired, while soft robots and artificial muscles extend the idea into materials and actuation.

ExampleMIT's Sangbae Kim lab designed its Cheetah series of quadruped robots by studying the cheetah.

Also called: Bionic Robot
Related: Quadruped Robot · Soft Robot · Artificial Muscle · Legged Robot · Morphological Computation · Humanoid Robot
Sources: Bio-inspired robotics - Wikipedia