Innovation inspired by nature: capabilities, potentials, and challenges

摘要

Through evolution, nature came up with many effective solutions to its challenges and continually improving them. Bymimicking, coping and being inspired, humans have been using Nature's solutions to address their own challenges. Inrecent years, the implementation of nature's capabilities has intensified with our growing understanding of the variousbiological and nastic mechanisms and processes. Successes include even the making of humanlike robots that performsuch lifelike tasks as walking, talking, making eye-contact, interpreting speech and facial expressions, as well as manyother humanlike functions. Generally, once humans are able to implement a function then, thru rapid advances intechnology, capabilities are developed that can significantly exceed the original source of inspiration in Nature.Examples include flight where there is no species that can fly as high, carry so much mass, has so large dimensions andfly so fast, and operate at as such extreme conditions as our aircraft and other aerospace systems. However, using thecapabilities of today's technology, there are many challenges that are not feasible to address in mimicking characteristicsof species and plants. In this manuscript, state-of-the-art of biomimetic capabilities, potentials and challenges arereviewed.© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.