Researchers working in robotics are always surprising us with their creations. From small crab-shaped devices to huge 20 meter tall androids. Now, a team of scientists from Rice University in the United States has turned dead spiders into robots.
The idea may be a bit chilling for those who do not sympathize with this type of arthropod, but interesting for all those interested in discovering how the physiological characteristics of spiders have opened the door to the development of a new area of research called “necrobotics”.
Creating robots from spiders
The project started almost by chance in 2019. Daniel Preston and Faye Yap, two researchers at a Rice University Mechanical Engineering lab, were tidying up one of the rooms when they found a dead spider in the hallway and wondered why do spiders curl up before they dieexplains the university.
After a quick investigation, they discovered that spiders do not have muscles like the biceps or triceps of humans, but only flexor muscles. Thus, they discovered that they move with hydraulic pressure, and when they die they lose the ability to pressurize their body.
All this mystery had occurred in a mechanics laboratory, so they immediately thought that they could take advantage of this mechanism in an investigation. The idea, then, was to control the legs of the spiders to grip objects firmly, but without damaging them by excessive force.
Based on this idea, they tested inserting a needle into a wolf spider’s prosomal chamber to activate its legs with a small amount of air. Surprisingly, the dead arthropod’s legs moved instantly. In addition, to check the resistance of the arthropod, they successfully completed 1,000 opening and closing cycles.
“It starts to experience some wear and tear as we get closer to 1,000 cycles,” says Daniel Preston in a paper published by his university. The researcher believes that this problem is related to dehydration of the joints, but that it could be solved by applying a certain polymeric coating.
Applying the capabilities of the robot-spider
As we can see in the video above, the researchers used the spider for different tests. For example, for pick up a foam ball, remove a wire from an electrical bridge and manipulate other spiders. In the tests, they also noticed that smaller spiders can carry heavier loads compared to larger ones.
Preston believes that necrobotics could be applied in micromanipulation tasks. “There are a lot of pick-and-place tasks that we could investigate, repetitive tasks like sorting or moving objects at these small scales, and maybe even things like microelectronics assembly,” he says.
The researcher also points out that the spiders are biodegradable, so their use as robotic grippers would not generate waste like traditional mechanical elements do. For now, the team has more work to do. They will now focus on discovering how they can control the spider’s legs individually.
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