Prefer to throw the dead spider in the garbage as soon as possible. But this is not the case with Phi Yap technology. He decided to take it.
This sounds less crazy than it is. Spider legs can grip large, fragile and irregular objects tightly but gently without breaking them.
Working with colleagues from Rice University, Yap transformed a dead wolf spider into a musk. They call this method “necrotic”: the object is partly made of a dead animal and partly of robots
Spider legs do not have muscles, but move by hydraulic pressure. By injecting a little air into the legs, the scientists were able to move the dead spider. It turns out that the animal is able to carry a heavy spider like him.
The advantage that an ordinary robot excels at is that its manufacture is quite complex, while a spider is already quite complex in itself. “Necrobotics takes advantage of nature’s unique creations that are difficult to artificially replicate,” the researchers wrote in their paper. paper. Spiders are also biodegradable, so they create less waste than regular robots.
Dead spiders can be used for all sorts of things. “One of the applications we’re seeing is micromanipulation, such as in microelectronic devices,” said researcher Daniel Preston, who also helped develop spin.
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