Abstract
For over a decade, mechanical creatures have formed the basis for the final project in a large engineering class on mechanical systems design. Each year a different real or fictitious animal provides the inspiration and design requirements for synthesizing, fabricating, and analyzing mechanisms and power transmission systems to achieve a plausible biomimetic motion. We explore why biomimetic creatures are particularly suited to learning about mechanisms, and discuss implementation details and pedagogical insights based on our experience.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Abourachid, A., Hugel, V.: The natural bipeds, birds and humans: an inspiration for bipedal robots. In: Lepora, N.F.F., Mura, A., Mangan, M., Verschure, P.F.M.J.F.M.J., Desmulliez, M., Prescott, T.J.J. (eds.) Living Machines 2016. LNCS, vol. 9793, pp. 3–15. Springer, Cham (2016). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-42417-0_1
Bedini, S.A.: The role of automata in the history of technology. Technol. Cult. 5(1), 24–42 (1964)
Coros, S., Thomaszewski, B., Noris, G., Sueda, S., Forberg, M., Sumner, R.W., Matusik, W., Bickel, B.: Computational design of mechanical characters. ACM Trans. Graph. (TOG) 32(4), 83 (2013)
Faste, R., Roth, B.: The design of projects and contests-the rules of the game. J. Rob. Mech. 10, 7–13 (1998)
Handa, K., Lopez, B., McMordie, J., Solis, M.: If it swims like a duck. Technical report, Stanford University, Mech. Eng. Dept. (2014). https://undergrad.stanford.edu/programs/pwr/publications-prizes-and-awards/hoefer-prize-winners
Porter, C., Fearon, B., Devon, M., Stevens, M.: Bipedal robot design report. Technical report, Stanford University, Mech. Eng. Dept. (2017). https://undergrad.stanford.edu/programs/pwr/publications-prizes-and-awards/hoefer-prize-winners
Renouf, D., Lawson, J.: Play in harbour seals (phoca vitulina). J. Zool. 208(1), 73–82 (1986)
Richards, C.T., Clemente, C.J.: Built for rowing: frog muscle is tuned to limb morphology to power swimming. J. R. Soc. Interface 10(84), 20130236 (2013)
Rosheim, M.: Leonardo’s Lost Robots. Springer Science & Business Media, New York (2006)
Soong, A., Cooper, E., Cooper, A., Lin, K.: Slothy. Technical report, Stanford University, Mech. Eng. Dept. (2014)
Young, J., Le Roux, A., Sarsona, J., Oro, A.: Respect the pouch. Tech. rep., Stanford University, Mech. Eng. Dept. (2016). https://undergrad.stanford.edu/programs/pwr/publications-prizes-and-awards/hoefer-prize-winners
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Estrada, M.A., Kegelman, J.C., Christian Gerdes, J., Cutkosky, M.R. (2017). Biomimetic Creatures Teach Mechanical Systems Design. In: Mangan, M., Cutkosky, M., Mura, A., Verschure, P., Prescott, T., Lepora, N. (eds) Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems. Living Machines 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10384. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63537-8_47
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63537-8_47
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-63536-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-63537-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)