This is Moses.
He's a peregrin falcon, and an expert flyer.
The challenge for scientists today is to take all the stuff that Moses already knows
and apply it to the field of robotics.
'Biomimicry' is the process of solving complex human problems by taking inspiration from nature.
Through evolution, nature has already solved many of these problems with incredibly efficiency.
So by copying biology, we can take advantage of the engineering which has already taken place
over millions of years of trial and error through natural selection.
To find out how animals are helping us to engineer robots,
I paid a visit to the Bristol Robotics Laboratory;
a state-of-the-art research centre, based at the University of the West of England,
home to hundreds of robots of all shapes and sizes,
including underwater robots with whiskers!
So MechaLobster only has one real sense; and that's the sense of touch, given by the whisker.
What kind of animals inspired this?
His leg designs were influenced by a lobster
Although, to be fair, he's kind-of more influenced by mammals, really.
An exciting one is the walrus.
His eyes are situated slightly back from his head
so he can't really see that far in front of him.
So he has to depend on his sense of touch with his whiskers.
So he dives down to the sea bed, and he finds little shells.
And his whiskers are so sensitive, he can distinguish what has food in and what hasn't.
So imagine a tonne and a half of animal, the size of a car,
feeding on the tiniest little bits of food, with his whiskers.
Why would a robot need a sense of touch?
A lot of underwater robots, they base their sense on cameras and sonar.
But when you get up close - or if you're operating in Bristol Harbour -
you're going to lose a lot of vision on your cameras.
Even divers have to do things such as hand-surveys, where they touch an object.
So you need something that can actually define what they have felt.
So this is where the robots come in.
They want to start filling the jobs which are the dangerous, the dirty, and the repetative jobs.
Taking people out of dangerous situations.
Because at the moment, only humans can do some of these dangerous jobs.
And is this made of anything fancy? Or is the clever bit being done back here?
The whisker itself is quite fancy 3D-printing
But this is all just dead-material. Just like hair. Just like whiskers.
So there's nothing interesting really up here.
All the interesting stuff is back here.
This is effectively a ball-joint.
And there's a magnet.
And then there's a magnetic sensor at the back.
Amazing! So is that a reflection of nature?
Animals have whiskers and follicles at the end,
and they have nerves wrapped around the end of the follicule base.
So in some ways, this is quite inspired by nature.
So in the not-too-distant future robots like 'MechaLobster'
might be feeling their way around underwater, using whiskers like a walrus.
But how might we power these robots of the future?
At the Bristol BioEnergy Centre, they’re investigating one such alternative power source.
So what exactly is a 'Microbial Fuel Cell'?
Well, a Microbial Fuel Cell is like a battery
We have two compartments: the negative and the positive.
The negative side is where we have the bacteria inside.
The bacteria eat the fuel that we feed them with,
they are extracting the electrons from the fuel.
And they are passing the electrons through the wire
And it's the flow of those electrons that creates our electricity?
Exactly! And they are giving it to the other side, which is accepting the electrons.
And also they extract protons, that they diffuse through the membrane.
And here because of the oxygen that they have from the atmosphere
And the protons, they are probucing water.
Amazing! So, it's producing energy and water?
Exactly.
Now you mentioned you put a fuel in there.
And now, people at home might not know this
but there is quite a pungent smell in here.
[laughing] Tell us what you're using for fuel...
We are using urine in this lab actually as a fuel
for the microbes to eat.
So, that's why this...
You can definitely tell!
... distinct smell here.
Yes, I know, I know.
You will get used to it after a bit
[laughing]
So how is this technology inspired by nature?
Actually, it is inspired by our own digestion system
Where we have bacteria to break down the food and give us energy.
Microbial Fuel Cells have great potential because they can be used everywhere that we have organic matter.
It's not only urine, we can also use other types of fuels:
waste water, compost, food waste...
Any organic matter can be turned into electricity through Microbial Fuel Cell technology.
That's why Microbial Fuel Cells have a great potential in our world
because every day we are producing what we think waste
but for the bacteria, it's their food.
And by that, they can produce electricity. Which is very useful for us.
So one day - inspired by the way that our digestive system provides us with energy -
robots may be able to generate their own energy too.
Only, with a slightly different diet.
Earlier, we met Moses who’s been helping out a group of biomimicry researchers at the University of Bristol.
But what can a peregrine falcon teach us about flight?
The project we're here is looking at quantifying the stability of a bird in flight.
So trying to understand whether they're stable.
Which means they're flying along and they get hit by a gust of wind
And they don't have to do anything, and they'll come back to nice and level.
Or whether they're unstable, and they'll get hit by a gust of wind
and they need to do a whole lot of corrective motions to stabilise themselves.
So when we design something like a passenger jet, like a 747, we make them stable.
But the most modern jet-fighters nowadays are actually designed to be unstable.
And they have to have incredibly fast computer control systems
Which do tiny little corrective motions to keep them in the air and controllable.
Whereas a bird can move its wing geometry completely.
And it can change from a nice stable configuration configuation to a highly unstable one.
So we're looking at where birds choose to position themselves on that stable/unstable kind-of spectrum
So today we've been flying a peregrine falcon.
He's actually been taking off from that hill over there
and then flying past our array of camera here.
And they're all focussed in on one single point in space.
As the birds fly through that volume, we trigger the cameras.
So we get eight different views from eight different angles.
And with those eight different camera views
we can get a 3D computer model of exactly the birds wing shape as it was flying.
So one of the others things we're looking at is
how we might be able to use 'wing-morphing' on autonomous flying vehicles.
To be able to do the same sort-of things we see the birds doing.
So completely changing their flight dynamics by morphing their wings.
Like we saw today actually, when they're coming in to hit the lure,
he's acutally slowing down a lot and doing this dynamic breaking motion.
And we'd love to be able to do the same thing with our aerial vehicles as well.
In the future, have them coming in and perching and coming to a stop.
That's kind of where we'd really like to take this research,
is using it to inspire the design of morphing-wing autonomous vehicles.
So clearly there’s a lot that we can learn from nature.
And I’ve certainly learnt a lot from meeting some of the people and animals
who are helping us to engineer the next generation of exciting robots.
A huge thanks goes to everybody at the University of Bristol,
the University of the West of England, and Bristol Robotics Laboratory
who helped to make this video possible.
A special mention goes to Dr Corra Boushel who helped to coordinate this project.
She’s runs an awesome project called Robots vs Animals.
So if you want to learn a little bit more about biomimcry and robotics,
go and check it out at robotsvsanimals.net
Thanks for watching!