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Mechanical engineers from Rice University have actually turned spider cadavers into what they call "necrobots," able to function as mechanical grippers. The team inserted a needle into the spider's prosoma chamber and created a seal around the tip of the needle with a glob of superglue. This advanced a novel area of research, of using dead animals as robots, known as necrobotics.
The necrobotic gripper is capable of grasping objects with irregular geometries and up to 130% of its own mass. Necrobotics can be further extended to incorporate biotic materials derived from other creatures with similar hydraulic mechanisms for locomotion and articulation. Besides being the rather creepy subject of a scientific study, the necrobotic grippers could have some practical applications. The concept of necrobotics proposed in this work takes advantage of unique designs created by nature that can be complicated or even impossible to replicate artificially.
Researchers have explored a range of designs based on spiders, from rigid and hard hexapod robots inspired by the gait of spiders to soft grippers inspired by the actuation mechanism and architecture of spider joints that can blend into natural environments while picking up objects, like other insects, that outweigh them. The researchers noted smaller spiders can carry heavier loads in comparison to their size. Conversely, the larger the spider, the smaller the load it can carry in comparison to its own body weight.
Spiders are basically hydraulic grippers to move their limbs, as opposed to other mammals that synchronize opposing muscles. The dead spider isn't controlling these valves that worked out in the study because it allowed us to control all the legs at the same time. Also, the spiders themselves are biodegradable. So researchers are not introducing a big waste stream, which can be a problem with more traditional components. But one drawback to the dead spider gripper is that it starts to experience some wear and tear after two days or after 1,000 open-and-close cycles.
Setting up the spider gripper required a single and fairly simple fabrication step. The gripper spiders were able to lift more than their own body weight, including another spider and small objects like parts on a circuit board. Its mass decrease was 17 times less than the uncoated spider over 10 days, which meant it was retaining more water and its hydraulic system might function longer.
Researchers can take advantage of the inherent properties of the material, such as biodegradability and camouflaging capabilities, to potentially deploy them in nature to grip small and delicate samples in an unobtrusive and eco-friendly manner. The researchers hope to try the necrobotics method out with smaller spiders. They also plan to work out how to trigger the legs individually and experimented with coating the wolf spiders in beeswax.
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