This little robot mimics the Mighty Punchy of the Mantis Chamber
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Mantis shrimp he has one of nature’s strongest and fastest punches the force generated .22 through a street bullet. This makes it an attractive object for the study of creatures by scientists who want to know more about important biomechanics. Among other uses, it can lead to small robots capable of equally fast and powerful movements. Now, a team of researchers at Harvard University has invented a new biomechanical model for mantis strong attachment, and built a small robot to mimic this movement, according to recently performed role published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We are fascinated by the remarkable behaviors we see in nature, especially when these behaviors meet or exceed what can be achieved with man-made devices,” said lead author Robert Wood, robotics at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University. “The speed and strength of the mantis chamber, for example, are the result of a complex underlying mechanism. By constructing a robotic model of a striking appendix of mantis shrimp, we are able to study these mechanisms in unprecedented detail. “
Wood’s research team had titles when it was built a few years ago RoboBee, a tiny robot capable of partially unattached flight. The ultimate goal of this initiative is to build a set of tiny interconnected robots capable of permanent unrelated flight – a significant technological challenge, given the insect-sized scale, that changes the various forces at play. In 2019, the Wood team he reported the achievement the lightest insect-scale robot to date that has achieved unattached flight – an improved version called the RoboBee X-Wing. (Kenny Breuer, writing Nature, described “as a tour de force of systems design and engineering.”)
Now, the Wood team has focused on the biomechanics of mantis shrimp expulsion. As we complained in advance mantis shrimp many varieties come; 450 species are known. But they can generally be classified into two types: those that slide their prey with spear-shaped attachments (“spearmen”) and those that break their prey (“breakers”) with large, rounded claws and hammer-shaped claws (“raptor attachments”). “). These strikes are very fast (23 meters per second or 51 mph) and are powerful, often creating cavitation bubbles in the water, creating a shock wave that can serve as a follow-up strike, surprising and sometimes killing predators. Sometimes a strike also has sonoluminescence. can cause the cavitation bubbles to create a brief glow of light as they fall.
According to A 2018 study, It seems that the secret of this powerful fist is not created by the large muscles, but by the anatomical structure of the arms of the chamber loaded with the spring, resembling a bow and arrow or a mace. The muscles in the chamber pull the saddle-shaped structure from the arm as they bend and store potential energy, which is released by rocking the club-shaped claw. It is essentially a Latch-like mechanism (technically, Latch-induced spring operation, or LaMSA), which has small structures in the muscle tendons that serve to make the sclera watertight.
This is widely understood, and there are several other small organisms that are able to produce very fast movements through a similar binding mechanism: frog legs and chameleon tongues, for example, as well as jaws of ant jaw traps and plant seed explosions. . But biologists who have been using these mechanisms for years have noticed something unusual about mantis shrimp: a 1-millisecond delay between the action of unlocking and retaining.
“When you see a striking process in an ultra-high-speed camera, there’s a time delay since the scleritis is released and the attachment is thrown.” said Nak-seung (Patrick) Hyun, the first author, postdoctoral fellowship at SEAS. “It’s as if a mouse has activated a mouse trap, but instead of coming out immediately there was a noticeable delay before it was caught. There is another mechanism that keeps the attachment in place, but no one has been able to understand how the other mechanism works.”
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