Where and how to find bio-inspiration?

Abstract

Biologicalisation calls for the integration of biological knowledge in manufacturing. Although biologists have been cataloguing biological knowledge for centuries, for the non-biologist finding this inspiration as input for bio-inspired design is a major challenge. In this paper, three different methods are used to find bio-inspiration for a case study on the clamping interface of a flexible mobile machining unit: the AskNature database, a natural language processing (NLP) approach, drawing on a large corpus of biological publications, and an informal consultation of an expert biologist as could be organised by a design office. The comparison of the retrieved principles with AskNature as a baseline indicates that the NLP approach allows retrieving publications about relevant biological strategies with a good recall performance, without involving an expert. However, extracting the working principles from the biological articles retrieved with the NLP approach is found to be error-prone and time consuming.

Metrics for Bio-Inspiration Based on Taxonomies

“…Already several search tools have been developed which can be roughly categorized as three different approaches: direct consultation of a biologist, using a specially prepared database and using natural language biological documents for identifying bio-inspiration (Willocx et al, 2020). A major drawback of consulting an expert biologist is the limit of his or her current knowledge and the possible bias to his/her own research domain (Shu et al, 2011;Graeff et al, 2020).…”

“…The major issue with database approaches is the enormous effort that is required for the population of the database with biological strategies Graeff et al, 2019a). The natural language search tools result in a large quantity of potentially relevant biological documents, which makes the selection of relevant documents time-consuming (Kaiser et al, 2013;Willocx et al, 2020). Furthermore, as shown in (Willocx et al, 2020), due to the focus on the organism performing the strategy, many parallel strategies employing the same principle are also submitted in a database like AskNature.…”

“…During a case study on the development of a mobile machining unit, bio-inspiration was retrieved for the development of a clamping interface providing temporary attachment (van Houten et al, 2021). The bio-inspiration was retrieved by consultation of an expert biologist, by searching in the AskNature database (Deldin and Schuknecht, 2014) and by using a natural language search tool (Willocx et al, 2020). The retrieved inspiration (biological articles and AskNature entries) was scanned and manually grouped by a mechanical engineer in eight different working principles: suction, mechanical friction using either a pliable skin or a claw, wet and dry adhesive pads using the Van der Waals forces, capillary adhesion and the use of polymers, either in a mucus or as strings.…”

“…Third, three metrics are proposed to rank the working principle clusters based on the occurrences of their focus organisms in a taxonomy. Finally, to illustrate the use of the metrics, they are applied to the working principles identified in the case study from (Willocx et al, 2020) on 'temporary adhesion'.…”

A Speculation on the Potential Support of Bio-Inspired Design to Biologicalisation in Manufacturing

“…robotics, materials and sensors. Recent cases in point of BID application include composite and other architected materials in (Voelkel and Wartzack, 2018;Jia and Wang, 2019), as well as parts of robots (Li et al, 2019) and machining units (Willocx et al, 2020). Moreover, the implementation of BID principles is extended to the organization of production systems, as in (Dias-Ferreira et al, 2018).…”