Biomimicry

The knapsack problem is the classic optimisation problem: You have a backpack that can carry only a certain weight. You have a set of items, each with a weight and a value.

Duke University researchers have demonstrated Argus, a 20-legged robot whose sea-urchin-like body gives it near-uniform motion and perception in every direction.

Researchers have developed printed magnetic sensors made from naturally sourced and lower-toxicity materials including iron, iron oxide, cellulose, and starch.

This is biomimicry by a plant, and it just shows that nothing humans create will come close to the rich and bizarre natural world.

Researchers demonstrated a lightweight navigation system inspired by honeybee learning flights that allows small drones to return home using compact visual memories rather than large-scale mapping systems.

The consortium demonstrated distributed telecom routing methods based on pheromone-style path reinforcement and stigmergy. The work is notable because it applies swarm coordination principles directly to resilient communications infrastructure, where decentralized adaptation can improve network recovery under congestion or outages.

Bosch researchers developed a decentralized collaborative mapping system inspired by ant pheromone trails and swarm intelligence. Vehicles share virtual pheromone markers to distribute mapping effort and resolve uncertainty without central coordination, translating stigmergic biological communication into autonomous transport infrastructure.

Just call these tiny autonomous construction robots “antdroids” Biomimicry is a significant driver in robot design; like ants, RAnts are too small to possess human-level cognition and memory, so if they’re going to achieve complex goals, they need to out-source, or exbody, their data-processing to their environment.

Honeybee-inspired swarm framework targets resilient planetary exploration The history of planetary exploration has long been a chronicle of singular, heroic machines.

Gecko is interesting because it is not a humanoid-robotics hype company. It is a very applied “robots + sensors + asset data” company aimed at boring but valuable infrastructure problems: corrosion, wall thinning, cracking, maintenance scheduling, shutdown reduction, and safety.