Dead spider grip (Credit: Preston Innovation Laboratory/Rice University)
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
- A graduate student named Faye Yap and an engineer named Daniel Preston have found a way to use the legs of dead spiders.
- Yap and his colleagues at Rice University have been working with wolf spiders. Their work has reached a major breakthrough as they were able to use the legs of a dead arachnid to unfold and grasp objects.
- The robotic creation has been named ‘Necrobótica’.
Arachnophobia is the extreme or irrational fear of spiders. The treatment for this is usually exposure therapy, where a person is presented with images and videos of spiders or other arachnids such as scorpions.
But not all arachnophobes are open to these treatments. Exposing them to a large spider will only result in loud screams or a panic attack.
Well, that’s exactly how we expect spider-haters to react to this strange news about mechanical spiders. Yes, you read that right.
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As if giant eight-legged monsters weren’t enough in movies and nightmares, now some scientists are turning dead spiders into robots.
A graduate student named Faye Yap and an engineer named Daniel Preston have found a way to use the legs of dead spiders.
Yap and his colleagues at Rice University have been working with wolf spiders. Their work has reached a major breakthrough, as they were able to use the legs of a dead arachnid to unfold and grasp objects, according to Science Alert.
The robotic creation has been named ‘Necrobótica’.
The researchers said that the workings of a spider’s legs are very complex and almost impossible to reproduce with man-made models. That’s why the scientists stuck to the existing system, of a spider, with some mechanical additions.
Watch the video:
A spider can pick up heavy materials with small legs because “a spider extends each leg by actively contracting prosoma (cephalothorax) muscles to increase its internal hydraulic pressure.”
Researchers have now explained in a paper that the concept of necrobotics is a big step forward in robotics.
“The concept of necrobotics proposed in this work takes advantage of unique designs created by nature that can be complicated or even impossible to replicate artificially,” they explained.
The team was able to catch a dead spider in a small ball. They used the experiment to determine a maximum grip strength of 0.35 thousand newtons.