• International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.1-13
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• 2012

Over 3.8 billion years, through evolution nature came up with many effective continually improving solutions to its challenges. Humans have always been inspired by nature capabilities in problems solving and innovation. These efforts have been intensified in recent years where systematic studies are being made towards better understanding and applying more sophisticated capabilities in this field that is increasingly being titled biomimetics. The ultimate challenge to this field is the development of humanlike robots that talk, interpret speech, walk, as well as make eye-contact and facial expressions with some capabilities that are exceeding the original model from nature. This includes flight where there is no creature that is as large, can fly as high, carry so heavy weight, fly so fast, and able to operate in extreme conditions as the aircraft and other aerospace systems. However, there are many capabilities of biological systems that are not feasible to mimic using the available technology. In this paper, the state-of-the-art of some of the developed biomimetic capabilities, potentials and challenges will be reviewed.

• Biomaterials and Biomechanics in Bioengineering
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.249-269
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• 2015

A problem faced by oil companies is the maintenance of the location register of pipelines that cross the surf zone, the regular survey of their location, and also their inspection. A survey of the state of art did not allow identifying operating systems capable of executing such tasks. Commercial technologies available on the market also do not address this problem and/or do not satisfy the presented requirements. A possible solution is to use robotic systems which have the ability to walk on the shore and in the surf zone, subject to existing currents and ripples, and being able to withstand these ambient conditions. In this sense, the authors propose the development of a spider crab biologically inspired robot to achieve those tasks. Based on these ideas, this work presents a biomechanical study of the spider crab, its modeling and simulation using the SimMechanics toolbox of Matlab/Simulink, which is the first phase of this more vast project. Results show a robot model that is moving in an "animal like" manner, the locomotion, the algorithm presented in this paper allows the crab to walk sideways, in the desired direction.