Inflating spider corpse creates robotic claw game of nightmares
(credit: Preston Innovation Laboratory)
Shortly after the Preston Innovation Lab was set up at Rice University, graduate student Faye Yap was rearranging a few things when she noticed a dead curled-up spider in the hallway. Curious about why spiders curl up when they die, she did a quick search to find the answer. And that answer-essentially, internal hydraulics-led to delightfully morbid inspiration: Why not use the bodies of dead spiders as tiny air-powered grippers for picking up and maneuvering tiny electronic parts?
Yap and her colleagues-including adviser Daniel Preston-did just that. They transformed a dead wolf spider into a gripping tool with just a single assembly step-essentially launching a novel new research area they have cheekily dubbed "necrobotics." They outlined the process in detail in a new paper published in the journal Advanced Science. The authors suggest the gripper could be ideal for delicate "pick-and-place" repetitive tasks and could possibly be used one day in the assembly of microelectronics.
Preston's lab specializes in so-called soft robotics, which eschews the usual hard plastics, metals, and electronics in favor of more nontraditional materials. Hydrogels and elastomers, for example, can serve as actuators powered by chemical reactions, pneumatics, or even light. Roboticists have also long found inspiration for their designs in nature, studying the locomotion of such animals as cheetahs, snakes, insects, starfish, jellyfish, and octopuses. (See, for example, our story on the development of the OctaGlove, designed to grip slippery objects underwater.)